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Every time you see "artisan" or worse "artisanal", read it as "art is anal": anal lettuce, anal tomatoes, anal bacon, anal cheese, anal bread, etc. Worse yet, some self-proclaimed artisans have embraced "anal".

Pig tastes like long pork and decent folk do not keep them or eat them under any circumstances.

Heh--German joke :)

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/k%C3%B6nnen

whoosh.

I hope everyone remembers Slashdot is an international forum and not everyone has the same cultural heritage.

Although everyone in the Western world probably immediately connected with "Frankenstein", those with different cultural heritage may be as unfamiliar with our cultural relics as we are with theirs.

No harm, no foul.

do they have an X and Y chromosome or not?

Obligatory geek answer: Yes.

That is dumb. See also: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/substantive_adjective
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-substantive-adjective.htm

per-say

Per se.

What does your diatribe have to do with anything I said? All I said is that government should not mandate curricula, because once it does, it invariably leads to abuse as various special interest groups jockey to get their special viewpoints indoctrinated into the next generation.

Government should not mandate curricula? What kind of nonsense is that? Every one should have their own definition of what "science" or "math" is or what their interpretation of the Civil War should be? Without basic standards, the education of children will fail . The problem is when special interests poison the curricula with their own agenda not that there is a curricula. Your way invites abuse.

Or are you really so stupid and ignorant to think that kids will learn history, philosophy, and science if you leave it up to public school curricula?

Are you listening to yourself for a moment? We should not mandate standards, therefore, education will be uniform. What kind of twisted logic is that?

If that sort of argument is what you're implying by your diatribe, you obviously have never seen public school curricula once Catholics, protestants, or communists have gotten a hold of them; or worse, you have, and you don't even understand how distorted they are.

By your own argument every one should have their own standards. Please learn what the words "diatribe" or standards means:

Which part of "I think there should be no government mandated curricula at all." did you not understand?

It seems that you hate religion. But saying religion has no place in social studies like history is as narrow-minded as saying religion should be taught in science class.

I checked some dictionary websites there just to confirm that my usage was correct. I noticed this footnote on the wiktionary page, which helps to explain your view:

In American English, this word usually has a moral connotation, however it is not wrong to use "wrongly" as the opposite of "correctly."

I'm British, and wasn't aware that it is mostly used with a moral connotation in the US. Going by the dictionary definitions, it doesn't seem that I was using "wrongly" wrongly ;)

I actually did that, guess what I Found:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/asshole#Alternative_forms

Won't is short for Wollnot, woll now being an obsolete and archaic form of will.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/woll

It occurs to me wonder if they've also scored a mission kill on the Fourth Amendment.

Consider these two paragraphs from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(2001%E2%80%9307)#Fourth_Amendment_issues

The Supreme Court held in Katz v. United States (1967), that the monitoring and recording of private conversations within the United States constitutes a "search" for Fourth Amendment purposes, and therefore the government must generally obtain a warrant before undertaking such domestic recordings.

The protection of "private conversations" has been held to apply only to conversations where the participants have not only manifested a desire but also a reasonable expectation that their conversation is indeed private and that no other party is listening in. In the absence of such a reasonable expectation, the Fourth Amendment does not apply, and surveillance without warrant does not violate it. Privacy is clearly not a reasonable expectation in communications to persons in the many countries whose governments openly intercept electronic communications, and is of dubious reasonability in countries against which the United States is waging war. (emphasis mine)

So... thanks to the abject failure of the TLAs to keep their attempt at a global panopticon under wraps, such that it is becoming a reasonable expectation that the United States government is spying on everyone, including its own citizens within its own borders, does that mean the Fourth Amendment no longer applies to anything US citizens do on the phone/internet?

DA: "Your Honor, our surveillance showed the defendant read the Slashdot article about our surveillance, therefore he could not have had a reasonable expectation of privacy when our surveillance recorded the Skype conversation he had the following week with his partner in which he admitted to speaking in a free speech zone without a permit."

P.S. Sorry if I just ruined your reasonable expectation of privacy by posting this where you could read it.

"If only there were some. . .natural mechanism by which to explain variations in global temperature.
It would have to be massive, though. On the scale of our own Sun."

The idea that, just because I find the "Anthropogenic Global Climate Warming Change" club is tantamount to a religious cult armed with a computer model means that
I am automatically contending that "climate is constant", is more than a little silly. The idea of nature conservation is as conservative as conservare.
If the last decade of ManBearPiggery has taught anything, it is the imperative to reject categorically all appeals to guilt & fear. Make the argument, put the raw data and the model out there for calm reflection, or understand that you've completely undercut your point.

The way I like to remember it is that there are some languages with no words for "yes" or "no". Instead, answers to yes-or-no questions repeat the verb in the positive or negative. (Hence "bullshit" from Mandarin bùshì meaning "is not", "fault", or "blame".) I imagine that the West Country-tinged pirate dialect has gone halfway to this, keeping "nay" for no but letting "are" substitute for "yes". "Are they?" "Arr."

> Seriously do these guys get hardship pay or anything? Is it a rotational program where they get to go somewhere better after they do their time in the bunker? Or is this really just the worst assignment in the Air Force?

They collect the pay of a lieutenant or captain, which ain't nothin'.

It's not a bad assignment. They have a lot of free time and can do coursework for a master's degree or catch up on reading or just nap (obviously). While getting paid.

It's the best assignment in the Air Force for an officer who wants operational experience but cannot qualify to fly (or work drones). Not everyone wants to be a maintenance officer, personnel officer, or some kind of REMF: some want to be in Operations.

In particular, Hillary Clinton said "we are democracies thank goodness, both the US and the UK". Now, what did she mean with that remark, and would it be similar to the meaning that the common person might assign to it?

From ancient Greek demos + kratos, democracy = rule by the people.

One suspects that what the rulers and would-be rulers mean is closer to autocracy = rule over the people, coupled with the assertion that if the people don't actively resist (via rebellion), then they tacitly accept the whims of their rulers.

I don't have an ax to grind and I certainly don't want to create bad blood, but we can build a castle in the air of people all over the world who understand every English idiom.

I wanted to have one idiom for every letter, but I got tired of it.

That's your cue to look up the meaning of queue.

Your analysis is over-simplistic. For one, losing a battle doesn't necessarily mean losing the war.

Secondly, the money will at some point run out. Then you have to fight anyway.

Finally, it's not a simple matter of defeat or victory. There are victories that are worth it, and ones that aren't.

Convince them that even if they do win it'll be the latter and they'll go bother someone else. That doesn't work so well if the struggle is ideologically motivated, but that isn't the scenario here - it's about resources.

IPhones use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation (PWM) to dim its display cycling on and off rapidly above the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold not only is this annoying and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asthenopia inducing to some it is wholly unnecessary.

What is happening with the animations at certain brightness levels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_cycleof the PWM creates a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance
with screen movements shadowed by the moving appendages. You can see this effect by turning down brightness on your monitor and waving your finger rapidly in front of the screen. If you see distinct fingers rather than continuous blur through the motion you too are being made http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasicknessby the effect of http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cut_corners. The solution is to jack up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminance to 100% until your phones battery melts into a pool of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithiumlithium ions...no seriously just turn off the stupid animation feature. So much whining can be avoided with so few seconds of googling. Just take my advice and stay off the crack formerly known as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia.

One and the same, perhaps?

Lumia: Mujer que presta servicios sexuales por dinero.

Also, synonyms. There seem to be enough of them for many of them to be obscure, granted. That's probably not solely a Spanish phenomenon, and any length of time is hardly an excuse: I probably don't know all the synonyms for "prostitute" in my native tongue myself! It's such a popular notion, after all, it's bound to have many synonyms.

Well, yes copywritten: It says copyright 1963

And quoting out of context, the speech does say: "In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check."

On a more serious note: he also says : I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their characters.

I would say that day has arrived. His dream has come true. We can honestly say that his kids are brown-nosing assholes. Not because of the color of their skin, but of the shitty content of their character.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tenent#English/

See: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kaveri

Write something that uses a regular expression library (RE2 would be ideal, if your expressions are actually regular), and keeps the compiled patterns resident. Most of your time is likely spent parsing the patterns.

I'm probably going to get shat on by kids who don't know any better, but....

Use Perl. If a complex set of regular expressions is taking 15 seconds per email, then there's clearly something wrong with the implementation. I suspect you're doing too much backtracking. I've been guilty of the same in the past. In one case, simply anchoring my regular expressions to the start and end of the string reduced running time literally by two orders of magnitude. Just glom the whole message into a string and go nuts.

And before someone makes a 'write-only' joke about Perl regular expressions, I'd suggest you take a look at Perl 6 regex grammars, which provide you with the ability to lay out complex rulesets with ease - and makes them vastly easier to read.

As with any programming issue, it's horses for courses, and when it comes to parsing text with regular expressions, Perl is still at the head of its class.

No, the knew he was taking a risky action (not getting immunized) then traveling in that risky state,

He could potentially attempt to defend himself by claiming that he did not know this (not being vaccinated) was "risky", having been told otherwise by authority figures (parents, church). And also, being a god-squaddie, he'd claim that the state he was travelling in was one of "grace", which is some form of perfection.

It's total clap-trap of course, but it would play pretty well in America.

This entry proves conclusively that you will probably enjoy the Wikimedia Project's efforts in this area more.

Now suppose these scientists cultivate a tiny little brain from these transformed cells and harvest substantia nigra cells from it

On the anniversary of Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech, could you please watch your language?
:p

faggots can float, too

How about you counter GP's claim by actually naming the dog? [...] If you can not name the dog, just admit Israel has no dog in the fight.

I don't think you understand what the phrase means. It doesn't mean to have a favored side. It just means that you "have a stake in the outcome of the problem at hand" or if you have no dog in a fight, then "you are not concerned and will not be affected either way by the outcome of something." Here, have a few more citations.

The "dog" doesn't have to be a favored side that they're betting on. Neither side may be appealing to them, but they most certainly care about the progress of the civil war and whether or not it turns into a greater regional conflict that will suck them in.

homer simpson makes level 3's all the time

Fortunately he can pull a Homer and fix it too.

Where can I get me some booze and hookers for Plex? How do I pay my rent with WoW gold? What's the going rate for Facebook tokens -> USD conversion? How deep is your head up your ass if you don't see the difference between WoW gold and Bitcoin? What does it say about BtC proponents when even they think that Bitcoin is glorified WoW gold? Why would the Fed want the bottom of your shoes?

Contemplate that.

Yeah but probably many people think that "literally" means "word-for-word". It's logical to think so. Wiktionary's page for literally suggests that "figuratively" could be used instead.

This jives pretty well...

Jibes, even. Unless both the study you reference and your comments are in fact jive, which seems a distinct possibility.

The definition of homicide means when both the killer and the person being killed are humans.

<pedantic_mode>
Not exactly right.

Latin hominus: "of a man" + Latin caedere: hacking or hewing (the verb is caedo)

A woman hewing a man would still be called hominus caedere
A woman being killed with an axe would still be called mulieris caedere not matter if the wielder of that ax is an Orca, a man or another woman.

Ita est, you may be right, but for the wrong reasons: "homi" doesn't imply "the same", but only that whoever "homicided" the human was able to wield an axe.
To describe a situation in which an Orca hacks another member of the same species with an axe, one should use "homocide", not "homicide"

</pedantic_mode>

Since "hew" has the meaning of: "to make or shape with or as if with an ax", an Orca commiting a homice is actually a correct expression (hew a human as if with an axe but using its teeth instead)

Heaven forfend is a pretty classy idiom for making sarcastic remarks, you should keep it handy for special occasions. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heaven_forfend

"Without being able to look up the mapping from the database, the three words don't seem to be useful."

Exactly, consumer!

Yes, that's precisely the point. They are trying to sell you "one word'.

They do this by picking the words first and not allocating them to a location until you click "share". If you don't like the words, you can "share" them while pointing to a location you don't like. Then, you get another set of words.

So, there's no magical algorithm at work here...it's just a random number generator, and once someone writes an app that "shares" some random location until the words that come up are within some target set, and then fixes that in place on the desired location, their whole business model of selling words goes down the drain.

Even worse, the system will be gamed until every three word triplet will be assigned to someplace, and then the service is completely useless. Doing the math shows that they'd need 39,000 or so words in their pool, and although that's far less than in the English language, they need to use words that are easy to spell, not easy to confuse phonetically, and common enough for people to know them. But, words in the 30K-40K most frequently used range only appear about 20 times per BILLION words.

I'd never seen the word bikeshedding before. A very useful neologism - I'll have to remember it. And yes, a good description of many comments.

Perhaps "entering, then later leaving" -- as in: "We have powered devices for many years [starting with in the days of the Altair and the TRS-80] through Windows PCs and Xbox [which are now equally obsolete]" ...?

Ah, but there's always more than one definition of a word. From https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bigoted

[...] strongly prejudiced; forming opinions without just cause.

The key there is "without just cause". Card forms opinion based on a very general attribute of the person without checking his assumptions about that person. Those of us who have judged Card to be a prick have done so based on his own comments and actions. Yes, we are obstinately devoted to our opinion that he is a prick, but it's based on judgement of his actions, not prejudgement based on unfounded assumptions about him.

Seriously, I know it's linguistically sticky, but can we all get past this pedantic nonsense that being intolerant to intolerance is some kind of contradiction?

If only there were some way to translate binary data into human readable format.

Ever heard about semantic drift? http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/saboter#Verbe.C2.A01

No, you cannot disagree. I'm a native speaker, as well as a language graduate.

Agreed, 4 posts on something that is not even technically wrong.

While not using the old phrase, "peaked their interest" is syntactically correct.

Peaked is the simple past, and past participle, of the verb "peak".

By your logic, any program that compiles is "not technically wrong". There's more to communication than syntax.

And he's wrong in any case: the verb "peak" is intransitive.

Agreed, 4 posts on something that is not even technically wrong.

While not using the old phrase, "peaked their interest" is syntactically correct.

Peaked is the simple past, and past participle, of the verb "peak".

By your logic, any program that compiles is "not technically wrong". There's more to communication than syntax.

Agreed, 4 posts on something that is not even technically wrong.

While not using the old phrase, "peaked their interest" is syntactically correct.

Peaked is the simple past, and past participle, of the verb "peak".

In virtually all cases, generations are pegged at 20 years. The common "Gen X", "Gen Y", etc are all 20 year spans. In fact, virtually every named "generation" of the last century were equal or slightly less than 20 years.

You're confusing two different things, which isn't surprising since they more or less use the same word.

• "Generation", used standalone, is a noun and describes a measure of time expressed in a fraction of human lifetimes and is generally pegged at around 30 years. ("Three generations ago we did this thing or that thing.")
• "Generation ___" is a proper noun and a descriptive term for a generational cohort or a social generation. ("Millennials are all this social trait or that social trait.")

No, actually I'm not. The GP was being a pedantic twat by picking a definition of generation that was a) clearly not what the article was talking about and b) incorrect based on his/her own choice of definition.

I'm not the least bit confused about the GP's twatness, the definition of "generation", or the obvious intent of the author of the story in using the word.

In virtually all cases, generations are pegged at 20 years. The common "Gen X", "Gen Y", etc are all 20 year spans. In fact, virtually every named "generation" of the last century were equal or slightly less than 20 years.

You're confusing two different things, which isn't surprising since they more or less use the same word.

• "Generation", used standalone, is a noun and describes a measure of time expressed in a fraction of human lifetimes and is generally pegged at around 30 years. ("Three generations ago we did this thing or that thing.")
• "Generation ___" is a proper noun and a descriptive term for a generational cohort or a social generation. ("Millennials are all this social trait or that social trait.")

"I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse".

Does this mean help Jack dismount from the horse, or help Jack put the horse out of its misery?

Lolwut? No, it's the opposite, *by definition*. See here:

liquidity
2. (economics, countable) An asset's property of being able to be sold without affecting its value; the degree to which it can be easily converted into cash.

(emphasis mine)