In programming? Most languages seem to be designed with ASCII in mind, so you have to stick with what's available there.
In general? I think it's a matter of input methods. Give me an input method where it takes only two keystrokes to type "" and I'll use it instead of "NE" or "". If I need to use a vulcan death grip, remember a code, or find it in a character map, I'm only going to bother when I have motivation: either making a point, like earlier in this paragraph, or making a polished document. Why go to the effort in a casual email, or a forum post, when it's much easier to type "" instead?
Nah, we've been slowly eviscerating the space program over the past three decades -- long before W brought back "cowboy diplomacy." Sure, in part that's because going to the moon is expensive, so it's cheaper to go to near-earth-orbit, but it's also because people have it in their heads that spending money to go into space is equivalent to firing the money itself into space -- forgetting that there are gains in knowledge, advnaces in technology, and you know what, exploration is actually inspiring.
I don't think most people get inspired by much of anything these days. it's kind of depressing.
One of the red flags was that, while the auction was in British pounds and described in perfect English, the seller's info said he was in Germany -- and all his feedback was in German and at least a few months old. Suspicious, but it could have been legit. Then the seller asked him to send the money (via BidPay or money order only, so without fraud protection) to an address in China.
So: British currency, German account, Chinese payment address.
The seller kept dodging the escrow question, and signed his emails with a distinctly Chinese name that didn't match the typical German name on the account. The best one: When asked about the currency, he replied -- I kid you not -- that "China is a backward country so I can only accept GBP." I mean, seriously, WTF?
By this point, we weren't even convinced the guy was really in China.
Anyway, the next day he told me that he had heard back from eBay, and they'd verfied that it was a hijacked account.
Back on topic, a license wouldn't have done anything to stop this. It was a legit account and a scammer with a stolen password.
Most of the fraud done on ebay are by low volume sellers who build up their feedback to somewhere in the double-digits and then pull either a high-priced scam, or probably more likely a dump a bunch of lots (medium priced, say computers for a low price) and never deliver.
That, and people who hijack accounts (whether through phishing or othr means) that have good feedback and then pull the same tactics.
Someone I know almost got caught by one of those, but enough warning bells went off -- unfortunately after he had placed the winning bid -- that he contacted eBay about his suspicions and they caught the fraud before he handed over any money or anything else important. Meanwhile, he spent most of a day emailing with the seller trying to get him to use an escrow company. Some of the responses were quite entertaining, actually!
Nah, Y2K was based on real issues: a widespread misfeature in the way software stored information. Programmers spent years tracking down and fixing places where this occurred. As a result, there were only minor glitches when the date rolled over.
And of course some people were making overblown, overhyped claims about what could have gone wrong in the first place, in part because it fit in so well with apocalyptic "end times" thinking and the change of the millennium. (Well, the psychological millennium, anyway, even if the mathematical millennium didn't change for another year.)
This? This is a power struggle. No similarities whatsoever.
When I was in high school I was involved in a creative writing club. We put together photocopier-and-stapler collections of student writing a couple of times a year, selling them as fundraisers. For one of them, we wrote the entire introduction using words that were spelled correctly, but used in the wrong place.
It finished off with "Spatial tanks to <teacher's name>, who taut us awl wee no."
The 20-member panel, reporting at the request of a bipartisan group in Congress, said that without such an effort the United States "could soon loose its privileged position."
If nothing else convinces you of the magnitude of this problem, consider the fact that The New York Times confused "lose" and "loose."
Because I'm sick of reading people getting them mixed up...
The first amendment guarantees both freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Whether someone is a journalist or not, freedom of speech is always a guaranteed right. Therefore, who is determined to be a journalist has no bearing on freedom of speech.
What is at issue is freedom of the press. In particular, people have been arguing over confidentiality of sources. The idea is that by allowing people to speak to reporters without fear of reprisal (even if the government can't prevent you from speaking, your boss may still be able to fire you or someone who doesn't like what you said can still follow you into a dark alley and beat you up), they are more likely to reveal corruption, incompetance, abuse, etc. that society is better of knowing about.
That's where you have to decide who constitutes the "press" and who does not. Both freedoms are listed in the first amendment, but they're different issues.
Yeah, but no one can sue Yahoo for what happens on the rest of them.
Well, unless someone goes by the logic that "If she had been able to chat on Yahoo, she never would have gone over to Site X where she met this guy who killed her and buried her in his baement."
Hey, there've been crazier lawsuits. Of course most of them don't make it past the first hearing.
We have let a madeup word blur what a journalist is.
Actually, "blogger" has an actual etymology not unlike "journalist," just much faster and more recent.
web + log = weblog (n) weblog abbreviated as blog (n) blog gets used as a verb, just like log, as in to log an entry blog + er = blogger, one who blogs, i.e. one who keeps a log on the web.
It's been defined by use rather than simply being handed down from on high, and if people have come up with ridiculous derived buzzwords (like blogosphere), that shouldn't reflect on the root word.
A journalist is one who keeps a journal, originally in the sense of a daily record... which you could also refer to as a log.
Sesame Street? I suspect that would be too intellectually stimulating for some peoples' tastes. They don't want the children to *learn* anything -- that would make them lose their innocence!
Op/Ed generally deals with information that is already available, and is therefore less likely to run into confidentiality problems.
Remember, the issue isn't that speech is restricted for non-journalists -- everyone has free speech, regardless of that status -- the issue is that "journalists" are traditionally granted additional privileges of confidentiality.
In other words, if you make a distinction between bloggers and journalists, either could do an expose on something, but if someone subpoenas the writer to find out who revealed the information, a journalist has a better chance of fighting the subpoena than a blogger.
Benevolence, nothing. I'm talking about cold, hard cash. It takes a whole heap of money to get anywhere near the moon, and it's going to take more people with Bill Gates-level fortunes willing to sink a lot of money into a project that will take years to realize any kind of return on investment. I'm sure in a decade we (as in Earth) will have a thriving commercial space program in low earth orbit (like the zillions of commercial satellites we have already). But the resources to go to the Moon or Mars? I don't see the business world going there anytime soon.
And the Russian space program also grew out of German scientists that *they* captured after WW2. Seriously, Germany had a damn good rocket program (unfortunately it was aimed at their neighbors instead of at the sky), and both the US and USSR gave those scientists a chance to work on something peaceful and beneficial to mankind instead of just designing missiles.
OK, they had them designing missiles too, but if they'd been stuck in Nazi Germany they would've *only* worked on missiles, and if they'd been stuck in post-WWI Germany they probably wouldn't have worked on spacecraft anyway.
We're usually willing to collaborate, but only as the senior partner. The Canadian arm on the mostly-domestic shuttle, the ESA's Huygens probe on the Cassini spacecraft, etc.
I bet that China will land man on the moon a few times and never go back. Basically, it's pure politics and not science....been there, done that.
Just like the US...
If we'd been interested in going to the moon for the sake of exploration and science instead of just getting there before the Russians did, we'd probably still be there.
Slashdot Mirror
I entered an actual not-equal sign in that post, and Slashcode stripped it out!
In programming? Most languages seem to be designed with ASCII in mind, so you have to stick with what's available there.
In general? I think it's a matter of input methods. Give me an input method where it takes only two keystrokes to type "" and I'll use it instead of "NE" or "". If I need to use a vulcan death grip, remember a code, or find it in a character map, I'm only going to bother when I have motivation: either making a point, like earlier in this paragraph, or making a polished document. Why go to the effort in a casual email, or a forum post, when it's much easier to type "" instead?
How did you manage to make a post with no subject?
Nah, we've been slowly eviscerating the space program over the past three decades -- long before W brought back "cowboy diplomacy." Sure, in part that's because going to the moon is expensive, so it's cheaper to go to near-earth-orbit, but it's also because people have it in their heads that spending money to go into space is equivalent to firing the money itself into space -- forgetting that there are gains in knowledge, advnaces in technology, and you know what, exploration is actually inspiring.
I don't think most people get inspired by much of anything these days. it's kind of depressing.
One of the red flags was that, while the auction was in British pounds and described in perfect English, the seller's info said he was in Germany -- and all his feedback was in German and at least a few months old. Suspicious, but it could have been legit. Then the seller asked him to send the money (via BidPay or money order only, so without fraud protection) to an address in China.
So: British currency, German account, Chinese payment address.
The seller kept dodging the escrow question, and signed his emails with a distinctly Chinese name that didn't match the typical German name on the account. The best one: When asked about the currency, he replied -- I kid you not -- that "China is a backward country so I can only accept GBP." I mean, seriously, WTF?
By this point, we weren't even convinced the guy was really in China.
Anyway, the next day he told me that he had heard back from eBay, and they'd verfied that it was a hijacked account.
Back on topic, a license wouldn't have done anything to stop this. It was a legit account and a scammer with a stolen password.
That, and people who hijack accounts (whether through phishing or othr means) that have good feedback and then pull the same tactics.
Someone I know almost got caught by one of those, but enough warning bells went off -- unfortunately after he had placed the winning bid -- that he contacted eBay about his suspicions and they caught the fraud before he handed over any money or anything else important. Meanwhile, he spent most of a day emailing with the seller trying to get him to use an escrow company. Some of the responses were quite entertaining, actually!
Nah, Y2K was based on real issues: a widespread misfeature in the way software stored information. Programmers spent years tracking down and fixing places where this occurred. As a result, there were only minor glitches when the date rolled over.
And of course some people were making overblown, overhyped claims about what could have gone wrong in the first place, in part because it fit in so well with apocalyptic "end times" thinking and the change of the millennium. (Well, the psychological millennium, anyway, even if the mathematical millennium didn't change for another year.)
This? This is a power struggle. No similarities whatsoever.
When I was in high school I was involved in a creative writing club. We put together photocopier-and-stapler collections of student writing a couple of times a year, selling them as fundraisers. For one of them, we wrote the entire introduction using words that were spelled correctly, but used in the wrong place.
It finished off with "Spatial tanks to <teacher's name>, who taut us awl wee no."
Copied verbatim from TFA:
If nothing else convinces you of the magnitude of this problem, consider the fact that The New York Times confused "lose" and "loose."
Of course governments don't want people to have free speech.
That's why the people who wrote our constitution put it in the Bill of Rights.
Because I'm sick of reading people getting them mixed up...
The first amendment guarantees both freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Whether someone is a journalist or not, freedom of speech is always a guaranteed right. Therefore, who is determined to be a journalist has no bearing on freedom of speech.
What is at issue is freedom of the press. In particular, people have been arguing over confidentiality of sources. The idea is that by allowing people to speak to reporters without fear of reprisal (even if the government can't prevent you from speaking, your boss may still be able to fire you or someone who doesn't like what you said can still follow you into a dark alley and beat you up), they are more likely to reveal corruption, incompetance, abuse, etc. that society is better of knowing about.
That's where you have to decide who constitutes the "press" and who does not. Both freedoms are listed in the first amendment, but they're different issues.
Yeah, but no one can sue Yahoo for what happens on the rest of them.
Well, unless someone goes by the logic that "If she had been able to chat on Yahoo, she never would have gone over to Site X where she met this guy who killed her and buried her in his baement."
Hey, there've been crazier lawsuits. Of course most of them don't make it past the first hearing.
We have let a madeup word blur what a journalist is.
Actually, "blogger" has an actual etymology not unlike "journalist," just much faster and more recent.
web + log = weblog (n)
weblog abbreviated as blog (n)
blog gets used as a verb, just like log, as in to log an entry
blog + er = blogger, one who blogs, i.e. one who keeps a log on the web.
It's been defined by use rather than simply being handed down from on high, and if people have come up with ridiculous derived buzzwords (like blogosphere), that shouldn't reflect on the root word.
A journalist is one who keeps a journal, originally in the sense of a daily record... which you could also refer to as a log.
It's protecting Yahoo from getting sued.
How about:
Which income tax form did you file last year?
(a) 1040
(b) 1040EZ
(c) 1040A
(d) Cowboy Neal
Sesame Street? I suspect that would be too intellectually stimulating for some peoples' tastes. They don't want the children to *learn* anything -- that would make them lose their innocence!
Op/Ed generally deals with information that is already available, and is therefore less likely to run into confidentiality problems.
Remember, the issue isn't that speech is restricted for non-journalists -- everyone has free speech, regardless of that status -- the issue is that "journalists" are traditionally granted additional privileges of confidentiality.
In other words, if you make a distinction between bloggers and journalists, either could do an expose on something, but if someone subpoenas the writer to find out who revealed the information, a journalist has a better chance of fighting the subpoena than a blogger.
If I were to guess, most people in chat rooms are probably 14-18 years old anyway...
That's what we all said two years ago, when they launched their first astronaut into space.
It didn't catch on.
Benevolence, nothing. I'm talking about cold, hard cash. It takes a whole heap of money to get anywhere near the moon, and it's going to take more people with Bill Gates-level fortunes willing to sink a lot of money into a project that will take years to realize any kind of return on investment. I'm sure in a decade we (as in Earth) will have a thriving commercial space program in low earth orbit (like the zillions of commercial satellites we have already). But the resources to go to the Moon or Mars? I don't see the business world going there anytime soon.
Er... Post-WWII Germany. Damn typos.
And the Russian space program also grew out of German scientists that *they* captured after WW2. Seriously, Germany had a damn good rocket program (unfortunately it was aimed at their neighbors instead of at the sky), and both the US and USSR gave those scientists a chance to work on something peaceful and beneficial to mankind instead of just designing missiles.
OK, they had them designing missiles too, but if they'd been stuck in Nazi Germany they would've *only* worked on missiles, and if they'd been stuck in post-WWI Germany they probably wouldn't have worked on spacecraft anyway.
Q: Why the secrecy?
A: It's China.
Really, what more information do you need?
We're usually willing to collaborate, but only as the senior partner. The Canadian arm on the mostly-domestic shuttle, the ESA's Huygens probe on the Cassini spacecraft, etc.
I bet that China will land man on the moon a few times and never go back. Basically, it's pure politics and not science. ...been there, done that.
Just like the US...
If we'd been interested in going to the moon for the sake of exploration and science instead of just getting there before the Russians did, we'd probably still be there.