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Find out what happened to China with opium...

Heh, really.

The law is not designed to make drugs disappear. On the contrary, it's designed to maximize profit for a very small group of people. It's important for them to keep folks drunk and stupid, lest they see trough the farce. The only balance being to keep consumption down to a level to where people would still show up for work so they can afford to keep buying. I would be very interested in seeing what would happen to the world's economies(especially U.S./UK) if everyone quit doing coke for even just a month. Contraband and piracy are the heart and soul of capitalism. The drug laws have no moral backing. Like all prohibitions, it's all about money and power. Which, of course, should be no surprise, either.

It is coming along nicely, 2.1 was recently released. It is not an official MS product however: http://moab.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/

Affect and effect also come to mind, but you'll find most of these on Slashdot fairly often: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html#erro rs

The replacement for MSPaint will most likely be Paint.Net a Washington State University project with MS support.

... and the rest of these..

Another free product along those lines is Paint.NET

At Washington State University, they are working on Paint.net [moab.eecs.wsu.edu], a Paint replacement what resembles Photoshop in many ways.

Paint.NET has many of the powerful features that expensive commercial applications have, including the ability to use layers. We welcome any suggestions, and provide the source code for final releases under the MIT License. Please explore this website, download the software and try out many of the things you would do on those other expensive or complicated applications.

Until you said "all intensive purposes", you probably meant to say "all intents and purposes".

In any case, I think you have the right idea, only the difference between typing letters and moving along a line is that a line is continuous but characters are discrete. You don't need analog control (a mouse, scroll wheel, etc) to make discrete changes.

Also the use of the word "bring" is incorrect.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/bring.html/

Learn to speak proper English like what I does.

Learn it. Know it. Live it.

"Well, I'm sorry but I find it fair. When you install your WinXp system, how do you process images? The only tool you got is MS Paint, unless you want to pay some £500+ for photoshop."

There's always Paint.Net :-)
There are also plenty of image processing apps on download.com.
There is also the Windows version of Gimp, itself.

The funny thing is that you'd be among the first to scream bloody murder if Microsoft did bundle more powerful apps with Windows, as that would be "anti-competitive" (and you probably did scream as much with regard to browsers). The hypocrisy is palpable. LOL

I downloaded it, it works, I don't use it much, nor do I use Gimp much or anyother painting tool.

Apparently written with C#. Here it's a "free replacement for MS-Paint software"

In what way does it beg the question?

> This begs the question,

No, it raises the question.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/begs.html

um.... Paint .net?

or is it the other way?

"But it begs the question why any company..."

Wrong. It raises the question. To beg the question is quite a bit different.

There's no evidence of biological change. The evidence is that the change is not biological. The evidence is that the changes, instead of being biological, is due to changes in nutrition and culture.

There's no difference in bone structure, brain size in the last 130,000 years. There's very little difference in brain size between modern humans and Homo Erectus (some Homo Erectus skulls are a normal size for a man), which goes back over 1 million years.

We are indeed quite different that we were 10000 years ago, but biological evolution is much slower than that, amd the difference are caused by other factors.

Quick summary.

More accuracy and detail.

Paint.NET is also a formidable photo-editing and drawing app on non-professional desktops with a much more user-friendly interface than The GIMP and has features that echo Photoshop.

The price is also right (free).

I think Paint.NET is starting to become real competition. MS is embracing it too. The GIMP competition for adobe? I'm not sure but I don't think so.

I may have a fix for the phone home issues. If you have a document that phones home, please post a link to it here.

I'll see your punctuation error and raise you an improper use of myriad.

Actually, not necessarily. Although you are technically correct (and I myself prefer "were" over "was"), subjunctive in English is widely recognized as being virtually extinct. Almost no one knows the difference anymore, which is a definite shame considering that there is one.

I think the grandparent is quite correct. It is difficult capturing PKD on film. First off, his stories are usually very dense and character driven. That means a long film and being able to do character development.

For instance, Blade Runner has only the setting of the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the most basic plot elements. Its missing Deckerd's marital problems, Mercerism, the little existential crisis, lots of important scenes and ideas, etc. Scott pretty much took the story and turned it into an action movie, albiet a moody and gorgeous sci-fi action movie.

This review has an interesting quote: The film version, on the other hand, was shaped along the lines of a mean-streets detective novel by Raymond Chandler. In it the pervasive confusion is a puzzle to be solved, not an exercise in mind-bending.

I just saw Blade Runner again at a late night viewing and am blown away by how well made of a film it is and how it captures the vision of a near-future dystopia, but it has very little in common with the book.

The other PKD stories turned movies have been mostly short-stories, as a short story is pretty much the size and scope of a typical movie. But even Minority Report was trimmed down and the politics from the story were removed and replaced with more action sequences.

The ancient greeks knew the earth was spherical. It's first suggested by the likes of Aristotle and Pythagoras around 600 BC. Eratosthenes, around 300 BC, went so far as to measure the circumference of the earth to a fairly good degree of accuracy by observing the difference in the length of shadows cast at different points on the earth at the same time of day. There's a good summary of who figured out what here.

Ptolemy (2nd century AD) was the church's calendar guy and had the spherical orbital model of the solar system figured out, except he had the earth at the middle of it. It wasn't until Copernicus (16th C. AD) and Galileo (late 16th and early 17th C. AD) that it was corrected to put the sun at the middle but we all know what happened next.

Oh, I see now. I'm a dolt. Or at least you're convinced that I am.

Well done, clever trousers.

How would that be misspelling it? This article suggests that you invited me to undress, which I promptly did. :)

But I'm still very amused at the moderation my post has been getting. I've been keeping an eye on it a little, and it's been up and down since I posted it. Some people just didn't get it I think, others seemed downright offended, and some thought it was funny.

At any rate, I think it's my most controversial post, and also the silliest. Thus, I am happy. ;)

...match its background, like a chameleon.

Grrr...

Chameleons don't change their colors for this reason. It's a myth. Stop spreading it.

http://www.wsu.edu/DrUniverse/chamel.html

consoles just don't cut the muster

is it "muster" or "mustard"?

• mustard
• tie?
• muster
• mustard

nobody seems to know for sure

You know, if the neocons really wanted to get the US out of the UN, they could have done it already. It'd basically take a vote of the Senate to end US participation and funding, and doing so would kill the organization.

I think what the neocons intend is much worse than simply dissolving the UN, which would, IMHO, be no great loss. What they intend to do is to turn the UN into what the Delian League became: the beginnings of an empire.

I think the difference between the Bush administration and its critics is that the critics of the Bush administration want the UN to be the beginning of a empire whose ruling class will be international: a lot of them don't realize that this is what they're arguing for. The Bush admin wants that empire to be American-run, and they do realize what they're arguing for.

No one in the US really wants out of the UN except the Libertarians, who got about 400,000 votes in the last Presidential election. Everyone else wants to keep it going, but they differ on what its purpose should be.

Has nothing to do with grammer.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/begs.html

funny, and here was me thinking that wales was a part of the british isles

Actually England is part of the Celtic empire. As the first race to sack Rome in 390 AD, and the fonders of Germany we find it easier to let you believe what you think you know.

We get more quiet time with our sheep that way.

Max Boyce is actually head of the secret Cabal that runs this world.

definitely

I'm sure he would, if you will reconsider your use of the contraction "you're."

it begs the question

no it doesn't

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/begs.html

While many people seem to use that form of the expression ("carrot on a stick"), that's not the historical version.

The consensus from alt.usage.english is that the carrot (reward) is to be contrasted with the stick (punishment): "carrot or the stick".

> Cool, monoculture

Cool, a trendy buzzword

> That'll save us the time of breaking a bunch of
> new schemes.

Destruction is and always will be easier than creation, but it's really nothing to brag about.

> For Christ's sake,

Is Jesus Christ truly who you wrote this for?

> how about working on the content instead of the
> wrapper?

Talk about monocultural thinking. Ever hear of division of labor?

Have you ever read the Epic of Gilgamesh? The Flood story in there is nearly identical to the one in the Bible. The names are different, there's a few different secondary items, but it's basically the same layout: God(s) decide to flood the earth, God tells guy to build a boat and put all the living things of the world on it, world gets flooded, guy ends up on top of a mountain.

There's a nice summary here. (Look at Tablet 11.) Interestingly, Utnapishtim (the story's Noah) is immortal when Gilgamesh meets him (well after the flood), very similar to Noah's unusually long lifespan.

We aren't talking about "Hey, there are two flood survival stories in ancient writings!" we're talking about "Hey, the Hebrews seem to have inherited a flood story and then adapted it to their own use."

Or if you want the Reader's Digest version, there's a quick and easy explanation of how to use critical thinking when you hear statistics here: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~taflinge/evistats.html

The first website is for Paul Brien's Common Errors in English which has the following for group:

When the group is being considered as a whole, it can be treated as a single entity: "the group was ready to go on stage." But when the individuality of its members is being emphasized, "group" is plural: "the group were in disagreement about where to go for dinner."

Now, however, I don't know what to believe :) I've read your arguments, gone over it again in my head, and I'm starting to lean towards your angle (which almost certainly means I'm wrong).

I can say that it is very common in New Zealand (that's why I threw the NZ and Aus part in there - I'm not British, but we are former colonies ;) to use it as a plural. It could be that group is being more commonly used this way, because of our pluralisation of company names?

I agree that I wouldn't pluralise other types of grouping: I would say "the flock of sheep has moved", "the herd of cattle is over there", "this stack of coins is quite high"...
But whenever I start to consider a collection of people, for some reason I have no problem with plural or singular use.

I concede the point though :) It appears proper English (American and British) is to treat group as mostly singular. Now, I have one more thing to watch in my written and spoken language!

And there are no tsunami's.

The apostrophe-s (e.g., dog's) indicates ownership*, whereas s at the end of the word (e.g., "dogs") indicates plurality.

For example, if you wanted to talk about the water that the tsunami owns, you would say, "the tsunami's water." If, on the other hand, you wanted to talk about more than one tsunami, you would say "there are multiple tsunamis."

We understand that the /. "editors" are about as useless as tits on a boar when it comes to cleaning up each story's text, so we ask that each author go the extra mile to 'cut the muster'.

For more information, please check the Common Errors in English site.

* Yes, there are other uses.

That's all I can think of for now...how about listing some free (good) games too? :)

Here's my list of spyware/adware free apps, in no particular order:

Crap Cleaner - Cleans temp files, cookies, etc
P2P + Codec Packs - Kazaa Lite Resurrection, K-Lite Codec Packs, QuickTime Alternative, Real Alternative
Gmail Notifier - System tray icon that checks your google mail
Winamp - Media Player
Open Office - Office Suite
AbiWord - Word Processing
GIMP - Image Editor
Paint.Net - Image Editor
AVG Antivirus - Decent free antivirus
Everest Home - System diagnostics and benchmarking solution
Daemon Tools - CD/DVD emulator
Zone Alarm - The free version is a decent firewall
CWShredder - Removes CoolWeb adware

I use Paint.NET for most of my stuff: Paint.NET page

I think you mean "...because of the number of users who don't contribute." Amount refers to a difficult-to-count substance, like a liquid, while number refers to things like people or coins. See here for a better explanation. I also recommend the book Write Right for everyday English usage help. Write Right also has a section in the back that tells the difference between frequently confused words like amount/number.

Everyday in an adjective meaning "ordinary"; every day is an adverbial phrase which means "each day".

But if you'd said, "I get to see how great the average American's everyday spelling and grammar are", you'd have been right.

(Yeah, I know grammar correction is usually trolling, but here it's in context.)

Other than that, your point is actually kind of at the heart of the issue. An ordinary encyclopedia works by getting experts in the field to write articles, and those experts are chosen by fiat by an editorial community.

The whole Wiki idea is that all of us are smarter than any of us, and tries to produce everything by collaboration. It is an epistemological problem, in that the average person's views of, say, quantum mechanics are mostly irrelevant, and contribute more to the field of pop culture than to physics. That's a problem to be debated by, well, expert epistemologists. The bad grammar can be corrected easily by other people, as long as the contribution itself is in good faith.

Life would be so much simpler if we could depend on good faith.

Do I understand the license correctly: all derived works have to include the permission notice, i.e. have to allow unlimited copying and creation of further derived works? If so, then this is like GPL but without the need to provide source code. Seems like a new approach to free software licensing.

Amazing. Nothing changes.

However, it begs a question

Once again: begs the question or this one.

Hey guys, Wow. My first post at /. I have been reading /. for approx 5 years now.

Here are some links for the download since the download link at university seems to be down.

I got these from the Paint.Net official forums.

http://www.wsu.edu/~rolo/PaintDotNet_2_0.msi
or
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/PaintNET/1096 481993/1

Nanda Somarajan
OMS I (That's right, 1st year Osteopathic Medical Student)