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what are really good online dictionaries (comprehensive, good interface)?

German-English
* LEO, from TU Munich

Spanish-English, Italian-English, French-English
* Wordreference good Sp-E

Where is a good Spanish-only dic (comparable to dictionary.com for English)?

PS: Your Kharma does get worse/better posting as AC, since the admins know your login & you won't get mod points (sniff)

I live in a part of the world where meat and cheese is often priced per 100/grams (but nobody says decagram here).

If you meant per hundred grams, you should have used the hectogram (1 hg = 100g) instead of the decagram. (1 dag = 10g)

I live in a part of the world where meat and cheese is often priced per 100/grams (but nobody says decagram here).

If you meant per hundred grams, you should have used the hectogram (1 hg = 100g) instead of the decagram. (1 dag = 10g)

A gadget is "a device that is very useful for a particular job" (http://www.wordreference.com/definition/gadget) Things by Ronco, space pen, laser pointer, etc are gadgets. A general laptop is NOT a gadget. Unless you define your job as 'using a computer' which as we all know if much more than just a single thing. Similarly, abacus and calculator are used for mathematics, engineering, etc, which again I think the 'field of mathematics' is much more than a single particular thing. If you want to make a list of the most useful inventions, many of these will go on there, but at least in my mind, a Powerbook is not a gadget.

It can be also the imperative form of the spanish verb violar.

probably you want: culo.

ciao for now...

What the hack is that supposed to mean? Is "stellar performance" something good, or something bad? And is "less-then-stellar" then something good or something bad. I am sorry, but the meaning of this phrase escapes me.

wordreference says "stellar" means "leading" or "starring". It still makes no sense.

Can we please use language that is understandable by more people then just the author and his friends?

Well, since there is no coffee in latte (unless the cow is a serious coffee addict), you can safely keep drinking it...

Parry Aftab seems to be completely misusing the title Esq. , which seems to be exclusively a guy thing.

How the parent post got +5 I have no idea....

Actually, much of the rest of the world DOES believe that "Zero defects does not mean that the product does not have bugs". Emphasis in quotations mine.

Definition of Zero-Defect. "an aspect of total quality management that stresses the objective of error-free performance in providing goods or services"

Six sigma's take on Zero Defect that states: "A practice that aims to reduce defects as a way to directly increase profits. The concept of zero defects lead to the development of Six Sigma in the 1980s."

Here's an explanation of why people are confused about the subject. Yes, it's an M$ site.

10 rules for ZDSD: "Not to be taken as meaning 'bug-free,' Zero-Defect Software Development (ZDSD) is a practice of developing software that is maintained in the highest quality state throughout the entire development process."

It may sound funnier if you know spanish, it's a word like verga

So a civil servant couldn't spell. I usually use dictionaries when I want to look up words and the DVLA when I want to make an alteration to my driving licence. One could do it the other way around, but I'm not sure the police would accept a document issued by Collins dictionary. They would, however, accept this definition : http://www.wordreference.com/english/definition.as p?en=licenced

This just sounds like the EU formalizing the common-law parctice of the Anton Piller order, which is basically a civil (as opposed to criminal) search warrant. In general, Anton Piller orders are very difficult to get and I imagine these would be too.

I'm also kind of dubious about your "3 times as strong" statement. Have you guys figured out a way to boil water at >100C or something?

Now, I don't know what kind of ISPs they have in New Zealand, but 1MBps shouldn't be that hard to achieve!

Yeah, but these are being used in the middle of nowhere (or, in New Zealand parlance, the wop-wops), where line integrity and signal/noise ratio makes an internet connection of suitable bandwidth unlikely.

Broadband is experiencing a very slow pick-up through New Zealand; one of the reasons is that it is prohibitively expensive in some parts of the country to get set up, if it's actually available at all.

If you RTFA, the owner/operation actually says "We don't have phone lines and telephone exchanges of sufficient quality to transmit the data, so we came up with the pigeon concept."

In conclusion, using pigeons under these circumstances makes sense.

A pompous pretentious official who is really a non-entity; pooh-bah

Yes, I used to work in dictionaries ...

I still can't understand why so many people in the U S of A (yes, it's the only country so far where I've heard such an abbreviation) keep calling milk what in fact is caffelatte...

Those are called "shibboleths", but around these here parts we like to type "shibuluths". I just looked it up yesterday randomly, and now it's already useful! I love that.

Try "perse", its Latin and means what you were trying to say, versus pur-sang which is French for thoroughbred or pure-bred.

The metre is defined in terms of the speed of light, so by definition c=299792458 m/s

Pretty pointless trying to measure it really.

It's not illegal per se... see the definition of non-stoichiometric. One of the first high-temperature superconductors has the formula YBa2Cu3O7-d (d should be a lowercase delta), where d is a small number, so you end up with something like YBa2Cu3O6.95 or YBa2CU3O6.7. However, In this particular case, I think saying that water is like H1.5O is incorrect, or at least misleading.

Watch out for the gaggle of hungry nerds! I couldn't imagine what else could be as scary.

The only time I read a # as "sharp" is when it is on a musical staff ie five parallel lines. Otherwise it is a hash as in #5 for number 5 or please press the hash key on the phone.

hash definitions

Of course when ever I see F# and Micro$oft together I read F#$%

The description reads like F# is OCaml on hash ie dumbed down.

sarcasm

How to discard it?
Well, I would just throw it away, after erasing my key.
How would I erase my key, you ask?
Microwave it.
Give it 120 VAC.

I envision the ring as having a band with a "U"-like cross section, with the key stored in memory, like SDRAM, FLASH, or an EEPROM type of arrangement; the guts of which would live in the channel of the "U" ... exposed, but slightly recessed, it would be a highlight or accent or whatever ...
Then you could easily insulate the contacts you would need to talk to it from the ring, and you could easily dig the memory out with an ice pick (or other tool of your choice) and smash it into little bits.

My comment about it being easily discarded was admittedly unclear; easily was meant to be relative to having it embedded under my skin, etc.

Might I suggest that you spend some time learning about what 'theft' is.

I don't know about him but I've done that.

Where does this idea that it has to 'deprive' someone of something come from?

I guess that question is your way of admitting that you have not spent any time learning about what theft is :)

Here are some links you might want to start with :

A dictionary defintion of theft"

Another dictionary definition of theft

UK Theft Act 1968

Utah criminal code

The meaning of theft is very well established. A key part of it is intending to deprive the righful owner of their property.

HTH

A little used word in the UK is milliard meaning one thousand million. It appears in quite a lot of european languages (examples: Milliard in French and "Miljard" in Swedish).

These internal chararistics, together with the frequent code-switching between Spanish and English common to all Hispanic variants in the USA, can render chicano totally impenetrable to monolingual Spanish speakers.

It's certainly true in the Southwest, where you routinely hear this "code-switching" en las calles and with the ubquitous cucina-help chavalines washing sus dishes sucios, if tu takes my meaning aquí. :-) There is a fascinating beauty that comes from being able to freely intermix two languages in one conversation and even in one sentence, where words and syntax skip back and forth.

You can hardly fault tejanos for their curious code-switching or their rampant Spanglishization. You may flinch at hearing how in Texas then rentan something instead of alquilándolo, or talk about driving their troques instead of their camiones. (The former is especially annoying, because la renta is one of those faux amis that already has a meaning quite different in Spanish than the English cognate would suggest!) Then again, when you listen to Texans speak English, you might be a bit unnerved there, too. :-)

Agonizing purists tell you that you simply cannot salvar dinero--that you can only ahorrarlo, of course, and that buffers must be guardados, as their souls are not in peril. :-)

If you want people to know a language, a literature, a history, and a culture, then you have to teach that to them!