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User: Panoptes

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Comments · 175

  1. Re:Oh good on Miss a Payment? Your Car Stops Running · · Score: 1

    "the cake referred to was dough that was caked to the sides of the baking oven during the baking process"

    Citation needed. The French expression is "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche." Brioche is bread with milk and eggs in it.

  2. Re:A solution in search of a problem... on Technological Solution For Texting While Driving Struggles For Traction · · Score: 1

    "Generally only the case if your car has an automatic transmission. Rather hard to do that if you are taking a test with a standard transmission."

    Nonsense. The only time you can't do it is when you're changing gear.

  3. Re:something tells me... on Google Wants To Test Driverless Cars In a Simulation · · Score: 1

    I presume that the simulation programmers are US-based and will create scenarios of American traffic conditions. For real-world testing, just put a few of these vehicles in a downtown Jakarta rush-hour and see how many survive. Here we've got every motoring madness know to man - and then some. I'll be first in the queue to buy any driverless car that can get from north to south Jakarta unscathed.

  4. Re:The slippery slope on UK Police Warn Sharing James Foley Killing Video Is a Crime · · Score: 1

    The British police have long since crossed the Rubicon of public trust and support. It is tragic to see a once respected and admired group of public servants become a venal, corrupt and despised bunch of bully-boys, despotic and arrogant beyond belief. In my more cynical moments I reflect that post-Thatcher Britain has at last got the guardians it deserves.

  5. Re:Self Serving Story? on Are Altcoins Undermining Bitcoin's Credibility? · · Score: 1

    "It's not really that alt coins destroy bitcoin's credibility, it's that bitcoin itself has no credibility in the first place"

    So 'real' currencies have intrinsic value and credibility? In the modern topsy-turvy world of economics, all debt is magically transmuted into credit, and duff debt is magically turned into 'sub primes'. It's all a financial sausage factory.

  6. Re:Would YOU be able to sleep in space?? on Study Finds That Astronauts Are Severely Sleep Deprived · · Score: 0

    "I'd want to soak up every minute of it. Maybe they should look into the mechanism called: "It's frickin awesome" How on earth did such a vacuous comment get modded +5 insightful?

  7. Re:Where was Orwell from? on UK Police Won't Comment On The Tracking of People's Phone Calls · · Score: 1

    Pen name taken from the river Orwell.

  8. Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A on "Secret Serum" Used To Treat Americans With Ebola · · Score: 1

    "And while many of its people and countries are not well off at all, there are some nations that are doing quite well financially, and should be able to create the infrastructure (including organizations and facilities) necessary for such research."

    Have you ever lived and worked in Sub-Saharan Africa? If you had, I don't think you'd be asking this question.

  9. Re:Transparency on FBI Studied How Much Drones Impact Your Privacy -- Then Marked It Secret · · Score: 1

    "The amount of information available to the public today that wasn't when Obama was elected is staggering."

    Never confuse quantity with quality.

  10. Re:Australia Deserves it. on Australian Government Moving Forward With Anti-Piracy Mandate For ISPs · · Score: 1

    It's good to see that the spirit of Sir Les Patterson lives on. Looks like Ozzy politicians are even more short-sighted and dumber than the sorry bunch of venal no-hopers currently running Westminster.

  11. Re:And yet, who is charging who? on Cable Companies: We're Afraid Netflix Will Demand Payment From ISPs · · Score: 1

    "Whom". It is ". . . who is it that is actually paying whom?"

    Correct - in formal usage. But 'whom' is in decline, and for many writers is mandatory only when governed by a preposition.

  12. Re:Ads are good for the internet. on Dealing With 'Advertising Pollution' · · Score: 1

    "People seem to forget, the internet RUNS on advertising money."

    Only people who have been successfully brainwashed believe this Big Lie. In olden times businesses had budgets for marketing and promotion which included advertising. Selling yourself and your services was an overhead cost.

    Along comes the Internet. Personal interest, hobbyist and fan sites then come along, and tech sites that share their knowledge and expertise altruistically, for the common good. Then we hear the magic word 'monetize', and all hell is let loose.

    Next is born that spawn of the devil, the notion that businesses have a God-given right to force us to watch advertisements, and fight tooth and nail to stop ad-skipping, ad-blocking, and the like. So don't feed me any crap that 'the Internet runs on advertising money'.

  13. Re:AI is always "right around the corner". on By 2045 'The Top Species Will No Longer Be Humans,' and That Could Be a Problem · · Score: 4, Funny

    "semi-autisitc fuckwitted word salad"

    When a computer can come with such linguistic inventiveness, we may truly say that AI has arrived.

  14. Re:I wanted to like it.... on Duolingo is a Free, Crowdsourced Language Learning App (Video) · · Score: 1

    " I get the impression they just have a list of possible ways of phrasing the translation of a phrase." Yes, that's one way of doing it - but long-winded and slow to develop.

    I write tests and quizzes using Moodle. Regular expressions are an economical and elegant way to parse short answers and award part-marks until an acceptable threshold of correctness is reached. And very simple to edit when exceptions need to be added.

  15. Re:Wife on Duolingo is a Free, Crowdsourced Language Learning App (Video) · · Score: 1

    "The theory is that you are being taught as a child learns" Bad theory. Childhood language acquisition is different from adult acquisition.

  16. Re:I wanted to like it.... on Duolingo is a Free, Crowdsourced Language Learning App (Video) · · Score: 1

    I just signed up and had a crack at the French lessons. My reaction? It's interesting, but limited. On the positive side there's some very nifty use of regular expressions in parsing the input answers - but on the negative, quite a few of the recordings are fuzzy and unclear. One example: the word 'diner' was completely unrecognizable. Its main limitation is that it's not communicative; everything is chunked into simple expressions without context. It's mechanical learning. I could see a use for it in my own teaching as a remedial/diagnostic tool, but I wouldn't recommend it as a primary means of learning French.

  17. Re:Is what he's saying really true? on Wikipedia Editors Hit With $10 Million Defamation Suit · · Score: 2

    My first reaction to this Wikipedia entry is that it's well (and very carefully) written; the content is supported by 29 detailed references to mostly legal and media sources. I cannot see any reasonable peg for Barry or his legal advisors to hang a lawsuit on. An accusation of bias would, I think, be problematic - several celebrities who like and respect him are mentioned (and quoted) at the beginning of the entry, without editorial comment.

  18. Re:I've heard slashdot is behind the times... on Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too, Study Finds · · Score: 1

    At one level, it's true (and long proven) that lectures have pedagogical limitations. But step back for a moment, and consider the lecture as a social event. It's the only time the course students gather en masse and actually see everyone else. It's a contact event - you meet old friends, make new ones, catch the mood of the group, swap study information, grouch about things. Take away the much-maligned lecture, and the college experience would be much the poorer.

  19. Re:You know what worked better for me then longhan on Students Remember Lectures Better Taking Notes Longhand Than Using Laptops · · Score: 0

    No, he missed the "them" class. But someone missed the grammar class, perhaps...

  20. Re:Will this effect markets? on Russia Writes Off 90 Percent of North Korea Debt · · Score: 3, Funny

    "something mysterious will happen to Kim Jong-Un". You mean he might get a decent haircut?

  21. Re:The Economist on Ask Slashdot: What Good Print Media Is Left? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Old magazines are a complete sense experience. The brittle feel of the paper, the colour as it browns towards the edges of the pages, the (by now) quaint font and layout conventions, the style of language and changes in structure and word usage, idioms and expressions that are no longer current or fashionable; the smell of the paper, the tactile quality of the old covers and binding, the faint noise of opening a long-closed magazine. It's an aesthetic experience that gives the publication a sense of history, a view of another time.

  22. Re:u can rite any way u want on Is Germany Raising a Generation of Illiterates? · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Up to the early 20th century, words were spelled phonetically" Utter poppycock!

  23. Re:Behind the times. on France's 'Culture Tax' Could Hit YouTube and Facebook · · Score: 1

    The French (capitalisation) government (spelling) has (singular verb) initiated (not instigated) ... and so on. What price culture?

  24. Re:A bad remake is a foot! on Sherlock Holmes Finally In the Public Domain In the US · · Score: 1

    "A bad remake is afoot!" - corrected that for you.

  25. Re:They named a country after a bird? on Prime Minister Wiretapped — Vast Corruption Upending Turkey's Government · · Score: 1

    I don't know which is worse - the ignorance, or the illogicality, of this puerile post.