While in the Czech Republic I asked at a computer store if they had any boxed linux distros. The clerk responded that they didn't, then leaned forward and whispered, "But I could download it for you and put it on a CD..." I said great, and that I'd pick them up the next day. I'm sure he thought he was doing something illegal.
Not necessarily. When I see an unfamiliar design, I need more time than normal to work out if it's interesting/useful or not.
Perhaps by using an unfamiliar design, designers can trap visitors into looking at a site longer than they otherwise would, and judging the site on its content?
Thanks for saying this. There are a lot of comments here that seem to suggest that any kind of automatic enforcement is wrong, but I agree that these sort of restrictions are similar keeping alcohol or guns in a locked cabinet or even installing protectors in power points.
Also - few people seem to be considering the age of the children. My 18 month old can already push a chair to the computer, climb up on it, and switch the computer on. She doesn't talk yet (except mama/dada), so she's not quite capable of cracking the windows administrator password.
OTOH, her 9 YO brother managed to search the various network resources and found somewhere I'd temporarily copied a Batman movie which he wouldn't normally be allowed to watch. He later confessed that he and his friend watched the start of it but didn't like it. My reaction was to reward him for experimenting with the computer, and review/tighten up security.
I see absolutely no problem in using the computer to restrict what the kids do, especially if trying to get around the restrictions teaches them more about the computer.
And what about chimp who was observed slowly peeling the skin of another chimp's arms before killing him? Was there a genetic advantage to that, or are chimps evil?
I honestly don't understand this argument. I think you must be hung up on the fact that the French word for euro happens to be euro, but the plural is not formed in the same way as in English.
Why should this be a problem? If you're speaking English, it makes sense to form plurals according to English norms. Euro is a currency, like dollar and pound, and similarly can have a plural. Plurals and other parts of grammar act as a sort of CRC-check, confirming understanding of the message. If you're muttering, "9 euro" could sound like "1 euro". The very audible sibilant S helps clarify the message.
OTOH, I think the point you're trying to make with the plural of lego is a valid one. Lego is (at least in my opinion) an uncountable noun. This means that you can't use numbers with the word lego ("two legos"), and that there is no real plural for the word. You also have to say "how much" not "how many" *
Uncountable nouns are common in English with things that behave like fluids; eg. water, flour, rice, coffee, information, beer, hair (and even money, but not euro!). They are generally very difficult to actually count, and are used with prefixes such as "a bottle of..., a grain of..., a piece of...". This seems to match lego quite well.
* There are plenty of examples of breaking these rules, such as when describing different types of a thing, talking in common units, or a sort of massive mixing of things: "the beers of Europe", "two coffees" or "The waters of the Euphrates".
These legends were also briefly mentioned back when the floresiensis story broke in 2004. But the sources also mentioned that such stories are extremely common. Almost every culture has stories about "the big people" and "the little people". Take hobbits as an example.
Unless the HBO lawyers can convince a court that this is a copy protection scheme (not hard), in which case people who create better taint-detection algorithms may be in violation of DMCA.
This is more like ladies' night at a bar. They simply spend their marketing budget letting women in for free and giving them free drinks.
They really don't need to talk to the male audience at all. Word of mouth (and free advertising on Slashdot) is far better than anything their marketing department can buy.
It doesn't compare with TV, because - like a bar - the product is a place to make social contacts.
In 1999 I was putting together a user registration form for a website when I noticed "Taiwan - provice of China" [sic] in the list of available countries.
I had simply copied the list of countries from another of our websites, where the same phrase was live. I asked the developer in charge of that site where he got it, and replied that it had always been that way. We traced it back through our version history and concluded that at some time our webserver had been hacked and "Taiwan" had been changed to "Taiwan - provice of China".
Instead of doing any real research, I went around the office and asked a couple of people whether Taiwan was independant. Since they unanimously agreed it was (including the C programmer from Hong Kong), we changed all our websites to "Taiwan".
I've never met a bot worth posing these questions to, but I'd be happy to try things like this:
o If you're using a qwerty keyboard, what letters are between w and t?
o Write "guls" backwards. What is an anagram of "owl"?
o 11 22 33 4* 55 66. What should '*' be?
These questions give the AI a shared reality to work with, unlike the super abstract human psychology (in "why do you like music") or the common 'popular reality', often seen in questions like "what's your favourite music". If an AI could answer these kinds of questions, I might think about calling it intelligent.
In 1916 Ford started using company profits to significantly cut the costs of cars. Two investors, the Dodge brothers, complained that this money belonged to shareholders and not to customers. The courts agreed.
It's illegal to run a public corporation where the interests of anyone (customers or staff) outweigh those of the shareholders.
I went to a lecture on this at my local planetarium last year. The conclusion of the astronomer giving the presentation was that the best solution would be lasers in Earth-orbit burning the comet on one side for long periods of time (more than 6 months).
There are lots of advantages; the lasers can be sent up before the danger is identified, they don't have the travel time (6 months in this case), the number of lasers can always be increased, the lasers can be repaired if there are problems, and the costs are relatively low.
The earth's orbit is eliptical, bringing the earth closest to the sun (perihelion) at the time when it is summer in the southern hemisphere. The southern sun is hotter.
I once placed a bid for 2051.00 euros on an item on ebay that I only wanted to bid 20.51 euros on.
The reason? The ebay input page was expecting a comma, not a point in the number. ie 20.51 was what I typed, and 20,51 was what I should have typed. I don't recall if there was a confirmation screen, but I probably didn't check it in detail.
Luckily the seller let me withdraw my bid. This mistake could have been similar.
Well how about someone posts the url of the check for updates here on slashdot. Then we'll be able to give "the company" enough false leads to keep them busy.
Secondly the guy isn't a pedophile because she isn't exactly prepubescent. There is nothing wrong with being attracted to girls who have gone through puberty no matter what their age, its a biological thing.
Try explaining that in prison!
Seriously, if the legal age is 17, and the guy fucks her when she's younger than this (which didn't happen, I RTFA), the chump is a kiddy-fiddler and he's gonna be at the very bottom of the prison heirarchy. Bad luck.
The media loves to tell you things like, "a pedofile was arrested today and found to have pictures of children as young as 4". I'd be very surprised if more than 5% of the average child-porn collection is pictures of under 12s. Please don't beleive that you've got to be interested in pre-pubescent kids to be a pedofile.
And Earth's south pole points towards galactic center, meaning there are more candidate for GRBs that direction. Most likely a GRB would just wipe out the Aussies and the penguins.
Maybe it was the size of a 9v battery, but did they claim it was a battery? That size could contain about 20ml of fuel (kerosene for example), and it wouldn't be too difficult to adapt a tiny combustion engine to move a full-size car in a circle.
If the container was a chemical fuel that was burnt to produce the effect, the size-to-power ratio isn't that impressive. I didn't see the show.
You hit on one of the main issues here: spoilers.
I just started watching BSG - downloaded via P2P because I'm in Germany. Now that I've finished watching the first series I can actually talk about the show with American friends and read American blogs. Previously I ran the risk of having the thing ruined because someone accidentally gave away a plot element.
The Broadcasters need to realise that the "global village" is causing their products to depreciate if they keep them on the shelves. It's not so much that they're losing customers because of episode downloads, they're losing cusomters because of modern communications!
Slashdot Mirror
Laptop Methanol Fuel Cells Promised This Week
As many many others have said, I'll believe it when it's in the shops.
While in the Czech Republic I asked at a computer store if they had any boxed linux distros. The clerk responded that they didn't, then leaned forward and whispered, "But I could download it for you and put it on a CD..." I said great, and that I'd pick them up the next day. I'm sure he thought he was doing something illegal.
Not necessarily. When I see an unfamiliar design, I need more time than normal to work out if it's interesting/useful or not.
Perhaps by using an unfamiliar design, designers can trap visitors into looking at a site longer than they otherwise would, and judging the site on its content?
Thanks for saying this. There are a lot of comments here that seem to suggest that any kind of automatic enforcement is wrong, but I agree that these sort of restrictions are similar keeping alcohol or guns in a locked cabinet or even installing protectors in power points.
Also - few people seem to be considering the age of the children. My 18 month old can already push a chair to the computer, climb up on it, and switch the computer on. She doesn't talk yet (except mama/dada), so she's not quite capable of cracking the windows administrator password.
OTOH, her 9 YO brother managed to search the various network resources and found somewhere I'd temporarily copied a Batman movie which he wouldn't normally be allowed to watch. He later confessed that he and his friend watched the start of it but didn't like it. My reaction was to reward him for experimenting with the computer, and review/tighten up security.
I see absolutely no problem in using the computer to restrict what the kids do, especially if trying to get around the restrictions teaches them more about the computer.
And what about chimp who was observed slowly peeling the skin of another chimp's arms before killing him? Was there a genetic advantage to that, or are chimps evil?
I honestly don't understand this argument. I think you must be hung up on the fact that the French word for euro happens to be euro, but the plural is not formed in the same way as in English.
..., a grain of ..., a piece of ...". This seems to match lego quite well.
Why should this be a problem? If you're speaking English, it makes sense to form plurals according to English norms. Euro is a currency, like dollar and pound, and similarly can have a plural. Plurals and other parts of grammar act as a sort of CRC-check, confirming understanding of the message. If you're muttering, "9 euro" could sound like "1 euro". The very audible sibilant S helps clarify the message.
OTOH, I think the point you're trying to make with the plural of lego is a valid one. Lego is (at least in my opinion) an uncountable noun. This means that you can't use numbers with the word lego ("two legos"), and that there is no real plural for the word. You also have to say "how much" not "how many" *
Uncountable nouns are common in English with things that behave like fluids; eg. water, flour, rice, coffee, information, beer, hair (and even money, but not euro!). They are generally very difficult to actually count, and are used with prefixes such as "a bottle of
* There are plenty of examples of breaking these rules, such as when describing different types of a thing, talking in common units, or a sort of massive mixing of things: "the beers of Europe", "two coffees" or "The waters of the Euphrates".
Look at the B&W picture in the article. A Borg cube is quite clearly visible.
These legends were also briefly mentioned back when the floresiensis story broke in 2004. But the sources also mentioned that such stories are extremely common. Almost every culture has stories about "the big people" and "the little people". Take hobbits as an example.
Unless the HBO lawyers can convince a court that this is a copy protection scheme (not hard), in which case people who create better taint-detection algorithms may be in violation of DMCA.
HBO wins and legitimate P2P loses.
This is more like ladies' night at a bar. They simply spend their marketing budget letting women in for free and giving them free drinks.
They really don't need to talk to the male audience at all. Word of mouth (and free advertising on Slashdot) is far better than anything their marketing department can buy.
It doesn't compare with TV, because - like a bar - the product is a place to make social contacts.
In 1999 I was putting together a user registration form for a website when I noticed "Taiwan - provice of China" [sic] in the list of available countries.
I had simply copied the list of countries from another of our websites, where the same phrase was live. I asked the developer in charge of that site where he got it, and replied that it had always been that way. We traced it back through our version history and concluded that at some time our webserver had been hacked and "Taiwan" had been changed to "Taiwan - provice of China".
Instead of doing any real research, I went around the office and asked a couple of people whether Taiwan was independant. Since they unanimously agreed it was (including the C programmer from Hong Kong), we changed all our websites to "Taiwan".
I've never met a bot worth posing these questions to, but I'd be happy to try things like this:
o If you're using a qwerty keyboard, what letters are between w and t?
o Write "guls" backwards. What is an anagram of "owl"?
o 11 22 33 4* 55 66. What should '*' be?
These questions give the AI a shared reality to work with, unlike the super abstract human psychology (in "why do you like music") or the common 'popular reality', often seen in questions like "what's your favourite music". If an AI could answer these kinds of questions, I might think about calling it intelligent.
See (or read) "The Corporation" (amazon).
In 1916 Ford started using company profits to significantly cut the costs of cars. Two investors, the Dodge brothers, complained that this money belonged to shareholders and not to customers. The courts agreed.
It's illegal to run a public corporation where the interests of anyone (customers or staff) outweigh those of the shareholders.
I went to a lecture on this at my local planetarium last year. The conclusion of the astronomer giving the presentation was that the best solution would be lasers in Earth-orbit burning the comet on one side for long periods of time (more than 6 months).
There are lots of advantages; the lasers can be sent up before the danger is identified, they don't have the travel time (6 months in this case), the number of lasers can always be increased, the lasers can be repaired if there are problems, and the costs are relatively low.
Which would be pronounced "veenux" by a German speaker.
Not all the categories: For example Australia also has good supplies of cotton and zinc, so there's no shortage of suncream and t-shirts...
:)
The Australian population centres are not between Sydney and Cairns.
Australian population density
The earth's orbit is eliptical, bringing the earth closest to the sun (perihelion) at the time when it is summer in the southern hemisphere. The southern sun is hotter.
I once placed a bid for 2051.00 euros on an item on ebay that I only wanted to bid 20.51 euros on.
The reason? The ebay input page was expecting a comma, not a point in the number. ie 20.51 was what I typed, and 20,51 was what I should have typed. I don't recall if there was a confirmation screen, but I probably didn't check it in detail.
Luckily the seller let me withdraw my bid. This mistake could have been similar.
Well how about someone posts the url of the check for updates here on slashdot. Then we'll be able to give "the company" enough false leads to keep them busy.
Melbourne's not on the Atlantic, dude.
Try explaining that in prison!
Seriously, if the legal age is 17, and the guy fucks her when she's younger than this (which didn't happen, I RTFA), the chump is a kiddy-fiddler and he's gonna be at the very bottom of the prison heirarchy. Bad luck.
The media loves to tell you things like, "a pedofile was arrested today and found to have pictures of children as young as 4". I'd be very surprised if more than 5% of the average child-porn collection is pictures of under 12s. Please don't beleive that you've got to be interested in pre-pubescent kids to be a pedofile.
And Earth's south pole points towards galactic center, meaning there are more candidate for GRBs that direction. Most likely a GRB would just wipe out the Aussies and the penguins.
Maybe it was the size of a 9v battery, but did they claim it was a battery? That size could contain about 20ml of fuel (kerosene for example), and it wouldn't be too difficult to adapt a tiny combustion engine to move a full-size car in a circle. If the container was a chemical fuel that was burnt to produce the effect, the size-to-power ratio isn't that impressive. I didn't see the show.
You hit on one of the main issues here: spoilers. I just started watching BSG - downloaded via P2P because I'm in Germany. Now that I've finished watching the first series I can actually talk about the show with American friends and read American blogs. Previously I ran the risk of having the thing ruined because someone accidentally gave away a plot element. The Broadcasters need to realise that the "global village" is causing their products to depreciate if they keep them on the shelves. It's not so much that they're losing customers because of episode downloads, they're losing cusomters because of modern communications!
He was probably thinking of "there're", which although used in speech, looks strange in writing. "there aren't" is the best alternative.