Linguists study usage, "they" is used in the singular and has been for hundreds of years which is why any linguist who wasn't just parroting an idiotic style guide would agree with Shakespeare and Chaucer.
I know a person who speaks and writes English, and they use "they" in the singular.
You won't be getting back all the energy that is dicipated as heat. (If you did, you would have yourself a perpetual motion machine. You wouldn't be able to patent it, though, since even the USPTO will throw that out without reading it.)
They wouldn't accept it, but for a different reason. There's too much prior art in all the perpetual motion machines that have been patented...
Those are cop show of sorts. Nearly everyone they show who isn't part of law enforcement is a "bad guy" (or a victim). There aren't many neutrals in such a show, and even the red herring suspects have to be a little "bad" otherwise they don't make good suspects...
Your wrong, exchanging ballot papers gets you associated with the new ballot paper. Swapping votes with someone you trust can always be done, but that doesn't make the vote secret - it just means the wrong person gets persecuted if things ever go bad.
In Australia we have a secret ballot (unless the ballots are secretly marked and no one has blabbed - in the UK government web sites explain the serial number thing so it's not secret by any stretch), it means that if someone votes multiple times we can't identify their votes and remove them. I have no idea what would be done - I guess a court challenge would result in a new election (for just the affected seats) if the margin was such that those votes could effect the outcome?
The fact of your voting is recorded, but in such a way as not to be able to link your name to a particular ballot paper. In case the ballot slips are secretly marked or anything like that, you can pick your own if you feel sufficiently paranoid {you aren't forced to accept the one the presiding officer gives you}; so it's secret.
That's simply not true. In the UK your ballot papers have serial numbers on them (not secret marks, but obvious serial numbers on the back) which connect each ballot to the counterfoil on which your electoral role number is written when you receive the ballot.
The idea being this can be used in cases of electoral fraud.
I use that every day, but it's a different beast. You can't connect to you machine at work from home and bring up the window you were working with. You can run the application just fine, but that's not as useful in some situations.
At least I don't know of a way to do so - I'd be happy for someone to tell me I'm wrong and tell me how to do it...
That's not random. That's people voting for the party they feel will do OK (with won't "destroy democracy" being the lower bound of OK), which is what voting is all about anyway, right?
In my electorate 31% of voters didn't give first preference to one of the two main party candidates. So if a lot of people just pick one of the big two without caring at all then there isn't a lot of people who actually support the main parties...
So have you any evidence of 50% of the people in Australia voting randomly?
The current counting in my electorate shows that 6% of people didn't bother voting correctly either intentionally because they don't legally have to actually vote, or because they can't write the numbers 1 through 11 in boxes correctly. Assuming not too many people are brain dead at least 6% didn't care enough to vote.
If 50% of the people voted randomly each candidate should get 4.5% or so of the vote just from those random voters; but 7 candidates got significantly less than that. The first candidate on the ballot paper only got 0.42% of the vote so 50% also didn't just write 1-11 in order down the page.
The numbers indicate that unknown candidates get less than 0.5% of the vote each and known candidates get significantly more - making random oting unlikely (note, the Democrat candidate who got 0.8% or so and is in neither of my categories is a special case - the party has disintegrated in recent times and hasn't got media coverage but was very well known last time round).
So I would suspect that people watch the TV and see the various parties on the news and vote for the one who annoys them least or has the prettiest hair or has the policies they like the most. It's shallow interest and they wish the damn election would be over with so the politicians would get of the TV, but it's better than not caring at all. They don't care enough to investigate whether claims and accusations make sense, but I suspect most could at least say why they voted the way they did. "I followed the Liberal how-to-vote card because Labor wants to raise taxes" for example.
3. Large portions of the populace that is damaged most by Bush's policies (particularly the 18-30 set) are the same group that historically don't vote. I was constantly fustrated in college by the vast amount of otherwise smart people who wouldn't bother to vote - I drove 9 hours roundtrip in a 12 hour time period to vote 4 years ago because I missed the deadline to vote by mail. Many of my friends could have cared less.
Shock horror, when you choose not to vote you get screwed over by politicians.
Krakatoa was a once in a few hundred years event, but anyway lets assume it represents a "good size active volcano".
The post you replied to claims humans release 22 billion tonnes a year. So to do that in a week the volcano would need to release over 36,000 tonnes of CO2 per second. 36 million kg to keep the units nice.
So how much surface area does the volcano have to vent that gas. Usually they vent through a small number of vents, Krakatoa had about 15 vents going before sea water breached the the magmatic chambers and *very* large steam explosion resulted. But let's pretend it vented over most of the volcano - say a 5 square kilometer area. So 5 million square meters. Assuming the CO2 was evenly released we have 7.2 tonnes per square meter per second. of CO2 release. Or 163636 moles, which at STP would be 3665 cubic meters. Now of course, it won't be at STP (seeing as it is coming out of a volcano and all) but it will be at both increased pressure and increased temperature which work against each other volume wise, and our error is so bloody large already who cares?
So the CO2 would need to be venting at a velocity of 3665 meters per second or 13194 kilometers per hour or 11 times the speed of sound.
The photos, videos, and so on of eruptions I've seen don't seem to have such an amazing gas release. The plumes of ash, smoke, steam, and whatever don't seem to be inside such a hypersonic jet stream of CO2 for an entire week (I guess you could argue most of the CO2 is released in big explosions, but that would increase the required velocity to even more extreme levels). And all the animals in a rather large area don't suddenly asphyxiate.
So my back of the envelope (or slashdot textarea anyway) calculation makes the claim seem unlikely. Can you point out where I made an area (as I said it was a quick calculation without much checking)? Or provide a reference to back the claim?
They have a pretty good shot at getting the final senate spot in Victoria, if they get enough primary votes to survive the first few culls as they have done very well in getting preferences.
In 2050 they (U.S. Census Bureau) project that 72.1% of the population will be "white". If you don't count "hispanic" as "white" then they predict 50.1% "white, not hispanic". Under either definition the majority is white.
It's a desert. The polar plateau gets gets less than an inch (water equivalent - 3 inches of snow) of snow fall a year.
Of course you gets lots of "snow sideways" - the wind blows the snow on the ground around which would have the same result telescope wise. And hence my pedantry is completely pointless.
Listening to emails being read shouldn't be all that different than listening to the radio.
Talking on a hands-free phone turns people into crap drivers because their brain starts doing all the stuff you mentioned. But that's due to the conversation element, your brain is making up for the fact that you can't see the person and get all those visual cues as to just what the hell they are on about. I suspect (though have no evidence or reference for) that listening to what is essentially a recorded message wouldn't have all those problems.
Of course trying to understand the sounds generated by a text-to-speech may well also make people crap drivers.
In keeping with slashdot themes I haven't even glanced at the article and hence it may do something unrelated to reading emails...
That's a fair point. The "end of the world" scenarios were just plain stupid - as everybody I knew who knew anything about computers understood (where they found the paranoid lunatics for their TV spots I'll never know)...
Some other scenarios were less stupid, but would have had less impact and those got fixed. The banks were never going to lose track of who owns what, but they may have had a few ATMs stop working if nothing had been done.
I remember our honours year "seconds until thesis is due" counter ignored the existance of daylight saving and hence was incorrect until daylght saving started. Y2K was at about that level of inconveniance...
I'm still waiting for the "Panel discussion with the idiots who predicted the world would end" TV shows. Maybe a five year aniversary show:)
See "The Y2K bug will destroy civilisation so you better stock up on cans of food and bottled water and shotgun ammunition, and a bunker in the middle of nowhere would be good too..."
Of course you personally probably didn't do the wolf crying but the media did and people know nothing happened (and don't believe that the people working to fix problems might have had something to do with that).
Also the "fear of computers" has been reduced by the wide acceptance of ATMs. After all if the banks trust them with huge amounts of money, why shouldn't I with voting]?[*]
* Of course banks don't want to lose money and don't gain anything from ATM fraud. The makers of the machines could steal lots of money but the banks would notice... Whereas with voting the machine makers and the election runners (or a section of them) can be working together to rig the vote - a very different, and much harder to secure situation.
And of course, they're just asking to be sued by anyone who hurts their wrist/hand and wants to blame it on following the instructions which said to hit it until it hurts...
Though, it does make sense if the problem is a non-parked hard drive head - but that itself is bad news if you even slightly care about the data on the thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Are they a friend of yours?
Verbs agreeing with singular they are plural - just to make things even more strange...
Linguists study usage, "they" is used in the singular and has been for hundreds of years which is why any linguist who wasn't just parroting an idiotic style guide would agree with Shakespeare and Chaucer.
I know a person who speaks and writes English, and they use "they" in the singular.
You won't be getting back all the energy that is dicipated as heat. (If you did, you would have yourself a perpetual motion machine. You wouldn't be able to patent it, though, since even the USPTO will throw that out without reading it.)
They wouldn't accept it, but for a different reason. There's too much prior art in all the perpetual motion machines that have been patented...
Shakespeare, Chaucer and any linguist with half a clue disagree with you.
I feel ill when I see someone getting a needle... That doesn't mean I am intolerant of people who give blood.
in fact, some of my best friends give blood.
Those are cop show of sorts. Nearly everyone they show who isn't part of law enforcement is a "bad guy" (or a victim). There aren't many neutrals in such a show, and even the red herring suspects have to be a little "bad" otherwise they don't make good suspects...
Your wrong, exchanging ballot papers gets you associated with the new ballot paper. Swapping votes with someone you trust can always be done, but that doesn't make the vote secret - it just means the wrong person gets persecuted if things ever go bad.
In Australia we have a secret ballot (unless the ballots are secretly marked and no one has blabbed - in the UK government web sites explain the serial number thing so it's not secret by any stretch), it means that if someone votes multiple times we can't identify their votes and remove them. I have no idea what would be done - I guess a court challenge would result in a new election (for just the affected seats) if the margin was such that those votes could effect the outcome?
The fact of your voting is recorded, but in such a way as not to be able to link your name to a particular ballot paper. In case the ballot slips are secretly marked or anything like that, you can pick your own if you feel sufficiently paranoid {you aren't forced to accept the one the presiding officer gives you}; so it's secret.
That's simply not true. In the UK your ballot papers have serial numbers on them (not secret marks, but obvious serial numbers on the back) which connect each ballot to the counterfoil on which your electoral role number is written when you receive the ballot.
The idea being this can be used in cases of electoral fraud.
I use that every day, but it's a different beast. You can't connect to you machine at work from home and bring up the window you were working with. You can run the application just fine, but that's not as useful in some situations.
At least I don't know of a way to do so - I'd be happy for someone to tell me I'm wrong and tell me how to do it...
That's not random. That's people voting for the party they feel will do OK (with won't "destroy democracy" being the lower bound of OK), which is what voting is all about anyway, right?
In my electorate 31% of voters didn't give first preference to one of the two main party candidates. So if a lot of people just pick one of the big two without caring at all then there isn't a lot of people who actually support the main parties...
So have you any evidence of 50% of the people in Australia voting randomly?
The current counting in my electorate shows that 6% of people didn't bother voting correctly either intentionally because they don't legally have to actually vote, or because they can't write the numbers 1 through 11 in boxes correctly. Assuming not too many people are brain dead at least 6% didn't care enough to vote.
If 50% of the people voted randomly each candidate should get 4.5% or so of the vote just from those random voters; but 7 candidates got significantly less than that. The first candidate on the ballot paper only got 0.42% of the vote so 50% also didn't just write 1-11 in order down the page.
The numbers indicate that unknown candidates get less than 0.5% of the vote each and known candidates get significantly more - making random oting unlikely (note, the Democrat candidate who got 0.8% or so and is in neither of my categories is a special case - the party has disintegrated in recent times and hasn't got media coverage but was very well known last time round).
So I would suspect that people watch the TV and see the various parties on the news and vote for the one who annoys them least or has the prettiest hair or has the policies they like the most. It's shallow interest and they wish the damn election would be over with so the politicians would get of the TV, but it's better than not caring at all. They don't care enough to investigate whether claims and accusations make sense, but I suspect most could at least say why they voted the way they did. "I followed the Liberal how-to-vote card because Labor wants to raise taxes" for example.
Random voting I just can't see in the numbers.
Why does that make you glad?
3. Large portions of the populace that is damaged most by Bush's policies (particularly the 18-30 set) are the same group that historically don't vote. I was constantly fustrated in college by the vast amount of otherwise smart people who wouldn't bother to vote - I drove 9 hours roundtrip in a 12 hour time period to vote 4 years ago because I missed the deadline to vote by mail. Many of my friends could have cared less.
Shock horror, when you choose not to vote you get screwed over by politicians.
Krakatoa was a once in a few hundred years event, but anyway lets assume it represents a "good size active volcano".
The post you replied to claims humans release 22 billion tonnes a year. So to do that in a week the volcano would need to release over 36,000 tonnes of CO2 per second. 36 million kg to keep the units nice.
So how much surface area does the volcano have to vent that gas. Usually they vent through a small number of vents, Krakatoa had about 15 vents going before sea water breached the the magmatic chambers and *very* large steam explosion resulted. But let's pretend it vented over most of the volcano - say a 5 square kilometer area. So 5 million square meters. Assuming the CO2 was evenly released we have 7.2 tonnes per square meter per second. of CO2 release. Or 163636 moles, which at STP would be 3665 cubic meters. Now of course, it won't be at STP (seeing as it is coming out of a volcano and all) but it will be at both increased pressure and increased temperature which work against each other volume wise, and our error is so bloody large already who cares?
So the CO2 would need to be venting at a velocity of 3665 meters per second or 13194 kilometers per hour or 11 times the speed of sound.
The photos, videos, and so on of eruptions I've seen don't seem to have such an amazing gas release. The plumes of ash, smoke, steam, and whatever don't seem to be inside such a hypersonic jet stream of CO2 for an entire week (I guess you could argue most of the CO2 is released in big explosions, but that would increase the required velocity to even more extreme levels). And all the animals in a rather large area don't suddenly asphyxiate.
So my back of the envelope (or slashdot textarea anyway) calculation makes the claim seem unlikely. Can you point out where I made an area (as I said it was a quick calculation without much checking)? Or provide a reference to back the claim?
Ever the optimists, I guess.
They aren't part of the Coalition, which may explain you lack of understanding.
They have a pretty good shot at getting the final senate spot in Victoria, if they get enough primary votes to survive the first few culls as they have done very well in getting preferences.
Are the French white? The Germans? The Russians? The Greek? The Spanish? The Italians?
most projections show that by 2050 the majority of the US population will be non-white.
Here are some US Population Projections.
In 2050 they (U.S. Census Bureau) project that 72.1% of the population will be "white". If you don't count "hispanic" as "white" then they predict 50.1% "white, not hispanic". Under either definition the majority is white.
It's a desert. The polar plateau gets gets less than an inch (water equivalent - 3 inches of snow) of snow fall a year.
Of course you gets lots of "snow sideways" - the wind blows the snow on the ground around which would have the same result telescope wise. And hence my pedantry is completely pointless.
Listening to emails being read shouldn't be all that different than listening to the radio.
Talking on a hands-free phone turns people into crap drivers because their brain starts doing all the stuff you mentioned. But that's due to the conversation element, your brain is making up for the fact that you can't see the person and get all those visual cues as to just what the hell they are on about. I suspect (though have no evidence or reference for) that listening to what is essentially a recorded message wouldn't have all those problems.
Of course trying to understand the sounds generated by a text-to-speech may well also make people crap drivers.
In keeping with slashdot themes I haven't even glanced at the article and hence it may do something unrelated to reading emails...
Don't let the fact that Auguste Kerckhoffs came up with the principle in the 1880s interfere with your "RSA made it up to make money" FUD.
That's a fair point. The "end of the world" scenarios were just plain stupid - as everybody I knew who knew anything about computers understood (where they found the paranoid lunatics for their TV spots I'll never know)...
:)
Some other scenarios were less stupid, but would have had less impact and those got fixed. The banks were never going to lose track of who owns what, but they may have had a few ATMs stop working if nothing had been done.
I remember our honours year "seconds until thesis is due" counter ignored the existance of daylight saving and hence was incorrect until daylght saving started. Y2K was at about that level of inconveniance...
I'm still waiting for the "Panel discussion with the idiots who predicted the world would end" TV shows. Maybe a five year aniversary show
people ... assume I'm exagerrating.
See "The boy who cried wolf".
See "The Y2K bug will destroy civilisation so you better stock up on cans of food and bottled water and shotgun ammunition, and a bunker in the middle of nowhere would be good too..."
Of course you personally probably didn't do the wolf crying but the media did and people know nothing happened (and don't believe that the people working to fix problems might have had something to do with that).
Also the "fear of computers" has been reduced by the wide acceptance of ATMs. After all if the banks trust them with huge amounts of money, why shouldn't I with voting]?[*]
* Of course banks don't want to lose money and don't gain anything from ATM fraud. The makers of the machines could steal lots of money but the banks would notice... Whereas with voting the machine makers and the election runners (or a section of them) can be working together to rig the vote - a very different, and much harder to secure situation.
And of course, they're just asking to be sued by anyone who hurts their wrist/hand and wants to blame it on following the instructions which said to hit it until it hurts...
Though, it does make sense if the problem is a non-parked hard drive head - but that itself is bad news if you even slightly care about the data on the thing.