C'mon, classical music is just like rap music: a neat idea when it first started, but everything after that has just been the perpetuation of ritualized stylistic elements, with little originality, and only a few notable exceptions.
I'm not completely sure that Chopin is one of the exceptions: it's complex, sophisticated elevator music, to be sure, but still elevator music.
This CDC page on Ebola nicely summarizes current knowledge of the virus. The bottom line is that an epidemic-level spread through a Western society is highly unlikely. The normal precautions that medical personnel take are sufficient to prevent infection. Aerosol transmission "has not been documented among humans in a real-world setting, such as a hospital or household."
That's not to say it couldn't spread at all, on a more limited basis, but just that statistically, you're incredibly unlikely to become infected by it. You're far more likely to get AIDS from your dentist...;)
Here's a CDC page on Ebola which doesn't definitively state that Ebola Reston is not dangerous to humans, but rather that the few humans known to have been infected with it have developed antibodies, without any symptoms.
Here's what the page has to say about airborne transmission:
The Ebola-Reston virus subtype, which was first recognized in a primate research facility in Virginia, may have been transmitted from monkey to monkey through the air in the facility. While all Ebola virus subtypes have displayed the ability to be spread through airborne particles (aerosols) under research conditions, this type of spread has not been documented among humans in a real-world setting, such as a hospital or household.
Certainly tolerance is relative. However, you didn't mention abortion in your list of "wickednesses" in your original message, so I'll postpone dealing with that until the end of this message.
I could just as well say you are guilty of hubris in thinking that the only true religion is no religion, or relative religion, or agnosticism, or whatever.
I don't claim to have knowledge of the only true religion. That's my point.
What I am saying is that the attitude which says "my interpretation of my religion is the only correct one, and allows me to judge everyone else" is what is really sad. I'm not saying that there is no religion, only that it is very difficult to be sure that everything that any individual happens to believe about their religion is true. As far as I know, "faith" is the only basis on which we can do so. However, different people's faith leads them in different directions. Different branches of the same church reach different conclusions for the same reasons. I know someone who was married by a gay Anglican priest. The Anglican church has been ordaining gay clergy, male and female, for over twenty years. Do you believe the entire Anglican church is in error, along with every other church which doesn't conform to your beliefs? If you believe that your faith makes you correct, and everyone who disagrees with you wrong, that's hubris.
It is no less hubris to claim there is one true God than it is to claim that declaring so is hubris itself
Again, that's not what I'm saying. You are welcome to believe, and declare your belief, in one true God. I wouldn't dream of arguing with your belief. Within reason, you're also welcome to try to convince others to believe as you do. The hubris is in believing that your personal interpretation of your God's commandments is correct in all respects, and then applying that standard to others who do not share your particular beliefs.
Reasonable discussion of these issues is a good thing - after all, we necessarily discuss them all the time in the political arena, for example. But your original statement:
So many people in the computer field are involved in such wickedness as homosexuality, paganism, drugs, and general irrevence. It gives the field a bad name and often makes one sad to be a programmer.
...in my opinion, reflects a significant degree of intolerance and absolutism, and doesn't seem to be a constructive contribution towards mutual understanding. I understand that your statement reflects your beliefs, but I think you should consider the source of your certainty in your beliefs, and how that reconciles with other people's certainty in theirs.
As for abortion, I consider it a very difficult issue. I certainly don't consider opposing it to be intolerant or unacceptable, in itself. However, I consider murdering adults as a form of protest against abortion to be unacceptable. But I also recognize that these are, in effect, my opinions, regardless of how many religions might back me up on it. It would be wonderful if we could all have an absolute knowledge of right and wrong. But we don't, and pretending and acting as if we do isn't going to make things any better.
You're speaking from the point of view of your religion. Does your God not teach tolerance? I was under the impression that she did.
There are many religions in the world. The dominant ones are the ones that have historically been the most brutal, and the ones with the most viral marketing mechanisms, such as sending missionaries around the world to destroy native cultures wherever they may be found. Christianity, of course, is number one amongst these.
If you claim that your particular interpretations of your god's commandments are the only correct ones, you are guilty of incredible hubris even within your own religion. You should consider the effect that might have on your alleged immortal soul.
For the record, I don't do drugs, am not pagan or gay. You might judge me as irreverent, but what I really am is sick of the hypocrisy of those who use religion as a weapon against everything they happen not to like or be comfortable with. The things you're not comfortable with may make you sad to be a programmer, but your attitude makes me sad to be a human being.
The article you're responding to is very thin on detail and full of holes, and basically consists of one Japanese researcher who runs a clinic, opining on the causes of some problems he's seen. But considering the way some people seem to lap this stuff up, perhaps the real problem is gullibility, not memory loss.
The concerns you have expressed have very little by way of solid basis. If you're worried about your own personal reaction to all the technology around us, you can control it yourself to a large degree. You don't have to use a cellphone, PDA, etc. etc.
But translating your own personal attitudes into some kind of global biological meltdown isn't justified. Our technology will have a big impact over the next hundred years, including many bad ones like pollution of various kinds, changes in the Earth's temperature, weather patterns, etc. But all the evidence we have to date indicates that brain meltdown isn't going to be one of those problems, pop-sci articles in mainstream media notwithstanding.
When steering a 100km asteroid towards Earth, confusing metric units with imperial ones could be a little more of a problem than it was with that Mars probe...
Try thinking cooperatively as well as competitively. Your airborne device could drop and interact with a small army of ground-based devices. The ability of any single device to understand its environment is limited by its point of view. By interacting with devices in other locations, your device and its controllers can become more knowledgeable, and more intelligent. You probably already interact with orbiting satellites (GPS) - why not with some little guys on the ground?
As just one example, will your airborne device be flying into bunkers to locate stored chemical weapons? Will it fly under doors?
A future robotic ecosystem will have both insects and birds.
Java's an OK language, but you can still bite yourself in the ass using threads in Java. I know, not because I've had that problem (most multithreaded code I've written has been in C++), but because I had to help a friend debug his threading problem in Java.
Threads are one of those things which, if you think they're simple, it's because you haven't understood them yet. Java makes it a bit easier to deploy threads, but it doesn't make designing threaded applications significantly easier, because the real design problems have to do with fundamental concurrency issues, and can't be magicked away by a language like Java. In some respects, Java can make things worse because it's not always possible to tell except by trial and error what the concurrency behavior of some of its library routines is.
people are always porting linux to more and more systems, and claiming it's a good platform for embedded systems, when it's just too damn big and bloated for it. so fanaticism gets in the way of good technical decisions and being able as a customer to get quality products.
Please explain why you think Linux is a bad choice for say, the Tivo video recorder, or might not be a better choice than Windows for car automation.
People port Linux to different platforms for the same reason that people are interested in using it for embedded applications: because the source code is open, can be customized as needed, and because it's extremely configurable.
Point me to the wonderful open source embedded OS that you have in mind, and perhaps we'll all start using it.
as long as Best Buy can prove they compared the signature on the card with the one the customer signed, they're off the hook too.
That's true. Of course, sale clerks at most stores don't often actually check the signature carefully, and if the store is found negligent, the card company can refuse to pay. Even so, banks absorb the costs far more often in these cases, so I'm sure you're right that they have an incentive to promote e-commerce (although the same applied to good old pre-Internet mail order.)
But in fact, it seems to me that in almost all cases, much fraud could be prevented by merchants. Simply checking all signatures, or only shipping to addresses registered with the credit card company, would eliminate a lot of fraud that currently happens. It comes down to the fact that merchants don't want to appear not to trust their customers - it's not good for business.
Anti-fraud measures like computerized detection of unusual buying patterns has helped a lot, though. Last time I saw a figure, approximately 0.08% of the dollar value of all card charges were fraudulent. This used to be closer to 0.2%.
As the other reply points out, credit card company agreements with the merchant prevent the merchant from coming after you for payment. If that did happen, a complaint to the card company should settle it.
Of course, you can't use this as a way to cheat merchants - you might get away with it once or twice, but if it became clear that that's what you were doing, your card could be cancelled and your credit rating would suffer.
Moving to a frac T is a signifigant jump in complexity. Perhaps they should have (gasp) HIRED someone full time to maintain it? Would be lots lots cheaper in the long run.
Do you mean a full-time on-staff employee? What would they do all day? Install a router and/or firewall properly, and you're pretty much done except for the occasional downtime, at which point you call your provider. I've never heard of a company with a single frac- or full-T having a full-time maintainer. They'd have a heck of a lot of free time on their hands!
Too bad most companies have a vision only slightly longer than the end of their eyelashes.
At least some criticism of management comes from not understanding the financial realities of running a profitable business. This seems to be an example of that.
With all "real" credit cards - as opposed to funky credit-card-like things, such as debit cards - the risk related to theft falls entirely on the merchant. Typical card agreements limit the cardholder's liability in case of card theft to a maximum of $50, and in practice I've never heard of anyone even being asked to pay that.
If I steal Shoeboy's credit card number (assuming she actually had one) by hacking into shoeboy.com (assuming there was actually something there to hack into), and use it to purchase an imperial ton of grits (the hot kind, naturally), it is the merchant who sold me the grits that will be out of pocket when the theft is discovered. The credit card company checks with the cardholder, and if the cardholder denies having purchased the items in question, the grits merchant doesn't get paid. Shoeboy wouldn't lose a dime.
This puts the onus on the merchant to verify that they are dealing with a legitimate customer, which is why many online companies won't ship to addresses not registered with the card company, especially when dealing with a first-time customer.
So, Shoeboy's statement, "Anyone who buys anything online is a fucking moron", might be applied to merchants who sell things online - or more to the point, their investors! - but not to cardholders. Someone buying something online with a credit card is actually being pretty smart. The only downside when your card or card number is stolen tends to be minor inconvenience.
In addition, if you're not happy with a product, and the merchant doesn't want to give you your money back, within reason, card companies will refund your money and stiff the merchant. I've had that happen when purchasing telephony hardware from a company that went out of business right after shipping my product - the company couldn't be reached for support, so I called Amex and they credited me the money.
Now, with Shoeboy, you can never really tell whether she's trolling or not, so maybe she already knows all this. But I post this purely out of the altruistic knowledge that I am contributing to the free and pure flow of e-commerce. Bezos would thank me, if his company weren't tanking...
The price isn't because Kiyosaki is particularly greedy, and it isn't because he's doing customers a favor by forcing them to value what they're purchasing.
It's simple: when you sell a product like this that's not a mass market product, dropping the price, on its own, doesn't necessarily increase sales enough to compensate. There's a sweet spot on the price vs. demand curve, and almost invariably, for "niche" products, that spot is going to be at a higher price than it is for similar consumer-level products, for the simple reason that the product itself is never going to sell as well as say, Quake.
I think the Heston reference must be tongue in cheek. Moore refers to his movie as an "epic". Heston is famous for his roles in epic movies like Ben Hur, or wannabe epics like most of his other movies. In Soylent Green, Heston gives a performance of unsurpassed hamminess - surely its mention is a clue that this is a joke?
Like others, I object to the use of the term "piracy" when applied to intellectual "property". When Blackbeard boarded your ship and took your gold, your womenfolk, and your life, you weren't left with identical gold, women, and life. "Piracy" is a pejorative term used by industry as a way of demonizing its opponents.
Even a superficial analysis of the issues surrronding intellectual property makes it clear that those issues are far from simple, and that the current attitudes towards IP in the legal and commercial sphere are often hard to justify. In many cases, especially related to patent law, those who benefit from intellectual property law do so at the expense of the public domain, and could just as easily be labeled pirates.
In this specific case, I agree that what Hughes did was perfectly acceptable and well within their moral, ethical, and legal rights. However, so were the actions of the original hackers of the system. Things get a bit more questionable when it comes to people simply buying a hacked chip to avoid service fees, but even there, "piracy" is not the appropriate term.
You seem to have missed the point of the message you replied to. The point is not who's right or wrong, the point is that the story itself is an interesting one, regardless of which side you take (if any).
The original message was correct: this was a nice piece of reporting for/., although I wouldn't have minded some more technical details.
I've used many of the trackballs mentioned on this page, including the Kensington, other Logitechs, etc. The Logitech Marble FX and its successor, the cordless TrackMan FX, are in a class of their own, and leave the others in their dust in terms of feel, control and precision. If you've ever found a thumb-driven trackball to be hard to control precisely, the FX is the answer - you can use any or all of your first three fingers, and your thumb too if you like.
As an added bonus, if you appreciate good design, this trackball is unusual-looking enough to have been used in the Sci-Fi channel TV series "Farscape" as a navigational control on the spaceship "Moya". Of course they tricked it out with a bit of paint and stuff first.
One drawback to be aware of: I don't know if there's a left-handed version, but if not, left-handers are out of luck since it's shape makes use with the left hand nearly impossible.
Looking at Logitech's site just now, I see that the Marble FX isn't listed anymore, but the cordless TrackMan FX is.
Re:"niggles" is a RACIST slur!
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In general it is unwise for us to consider the course of treating all African Americans as if they were uneducated buffoons incapable of any more than a third grade vocabulary as a remedy to the prior sins of Indo-European conquest and more specifically the slavery and racism perpetuated in America.
[...]
Perpetuating ignoprance helps no one.
I agree, in general. However, I think one can reasonably make the argument that the negative connotations associated with the word "nigger" are such that similar words should be avoided, not only in the interests of humoring the less well-educated, but also to avoid any appearance of having deliberately chosen a word that evokes another, more insulting word.
I'm not a big fan of "political correctness", but I do recognize that it serves a purpose as a kind of mindless set of rules for people who may not be intimately familiar with all the issues in a given situation and able to decide on their own what is and isn't politically appropriate in that situation. I did say that "to be politically correct one has to avoid not just racism, but the appearance of racism", and I think that's true. If one is ignoring political correctness, though, in favor of following one's own conscience, then the logic you've laid out applies.
My uncle used to talk just the way you do. He recently committed suicide. Your fanatic behavior is most likely symptomatic of mental illness. I wish you well in dealing with it.
Re:"niggles" is a RACIST slur!
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There was a much publicized flap over the use of the word "niggardly" not that long ago. It was a similar situation - a perfectly innocent word that happened to sound similar to "nigger". (We're all grownups, we can say it.)
The interesting upshot of all this, though, is that when you get right down to it, to be politically correct one has to avoid not just racism, but the appearance of racism. Which means avoiding words like niggle and niggardly, at least in the U.S., is probably a good idea.
It's a form of social oppression, but that's one of the less onerous consequences of ones ancestors having enslaved people.
Re:You don't know how heavy 5000 pounds is?!?!?!
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I saved a quote from/. the other day for just such a message as yours: "That was the most over-generalized, "This is what I have seen in my infinitesimal experience of the world, therefore it is true the universe over" statement I have ever seen." (Thanks to DaPhreaker.)
There are other English-speaking countries than the big four you mentioned. Where I grew up, I remember going to the store for pints of milk when I was about 6. But it all switched to SI shortly after that, milk switched to liters, pounds to kilograms, etc. The only Imperial unit I retained any kind of intuitive appreciation of was the pint. (Comes in handy in bars!)
I live in the US now and have had to absorb a knowledge of pounds, etc. but when I first came over, I found the units meaningless. Multiplying by a factor in your head is a poor substitute for an intuitive understanding of what a number representing a weight means. I know exactly what Michael JasonSmith means, and would find it similarly annoying to read a book about topics like physics which wasn't in SI units.
which is that fluency in English includes a basic familiarity with the peculiar units of measurement used in everyday life in the largest English-speaking countries
I find this a truly astonishing position to take. You might as well say that fluency in English requires a familiarity with the structure of the British aristocracy. Or a familiarity with the vocabulary of Chaucer. WTF???
Are you sure your position isn't just one of "I had to learn these dumb units so everyone else should do the same"?
> Everything else (family, friends, job, hobbies) should come far behind.
You have it totally backwards. If you must indulge your fantasies, don't put them above family and friends - that would qualify as an addiction. I would refer you to Alcoholics Anonymous, except they share the same silly fantasy. I guess you're stuck...
Well, I was being serious about looking forward to a lesson. I don't recall ever having heard or read the rule about this. Just about all I know about written English I learned from reading fiction, my schoolteachers certainly weren't any help.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not completely sure that Chopin is one of the exceptions: it's complex, sophisticated elevator music, to be sure, but still elevator music.
That's not to say it couldn't spread at all, on a more limited basis, but just that statistically, you're incredibly unlikely to become infected by it. You're far more likely to get AIDS from your dentist... ;)
Here's what the page has to say about airborne transmission:
I could just as well say you are guilty of hubris in thinking that the only true religion is no religion, or relative religion, or agnosticism, or whatever.
I don't claim to have knowledge of the only true religion. That's my point.
What I am saying is that the attitude which says "my interpretation of my religion is the only correct one, and allows me to judge everyone else" is what is really sad. I'm not saying that there is no religion, only that it is very difficult to be sure that everything that any individual happens to believe about their religion is true. As far as I know, "faith" is the only basis on which we can do so. However, different people's faith leads them in different directions. Different branches of the same church reach different conclusions for the same reasons. I know someone who was married by a gay Anglican priest. The Anglican church has been ordaining gay clergy, male and female, for over twenty years. Do you believe the entire Anglican church is in error, along with every other church which doesn't conform to your beliefs? If you believe that your faith makes you correct, and everyone who disagrees with you wrong, that's hubris.
It is no less hubris to claim there is one true God than it is to claim that declaring so is hubris itself
Again, that's not what I'm saying. You are welcome to believe, and declare your belief, in one true God. I wouldn't dream of arguing with your belief. Within reason, you're also welcome to try to convince others to believe as you do. The hubris is in believing that your personal interpretation of your God's commandments is correct in all respects, and then applying that standard to others who do not share your particular beliefs.
Reasonable discussion of these issues is a good thing - after all, we necessarily discuss them all the time in the political arena, for example. But your original statement:
As for abortion, I consider it a very difficult issue. I certainly don't consider opposing it to be intolerant or unacceptable, in itself. However, I consider murdering adults as a form of protest against abortion to be unacceptable. But I also recognize that these are, in effect, my opinions, regardless of how many religions might back me up on it. It would be wonderful if we could all have an absolute knowledge of right and wrong. But we don't, and pretending and acting as if we do isn't going to make things any better.
There are many religions in the world. The dominant ones are the ones that have historically been the most brutal, and the ones with the most viral marketing mechanisms, such as sending missionaries around the world to destroy native cultures wherever they may be found. Christianity, of course, is number one amongst these.
If you claim that your particular interpretations of your god's commandments are the only correct ones, you are guilty of incredible hubris even within your own religion. You should consider the effect that might have on your alleged immortal soul.
For the record, I don't do drugs, am not pagan or gay. You might judge me as irreverent, but what I really am is sick of the hypocrisy of those who use religion as a weapon against everything they happen not to like or be comfortable with. The things you're not comfortable with may make you sad to be a programmer, but your attitude makes me sad to be a human being.
The concerns you have expressed have very little by way of solid basis. If you're worried about your own personal reaction to all the technology around us, you can control it yourself to a large degree. You don't have to use a cellphone, PDA, etc. etc.
But translating your own personal attitudes into some kind of global biological meltdown isn't justified. Our technology will have a big impact over the next hundred years, including many bad ones like pollution of various kinds, changes in the Earth's temperature, weather patterns, etc. But all the evidence we have to date indicates that brain meltdown isn't going to be one of those problems, pop-sci articles in mainstream media notwithstanding.
When steering a 100km asteroid towards Earth, confusing metric units with imperial ones could be a little more of a problem than it was with that Mars probe...
As just one example, will your airborne device be flying into bunkers to locate stored chemical weapons? Will it fly under doors?
A future robotic ecosystem will have both insects and birds.
Threads are one of those things which, if you think they're simple, it's because you haven't understood them yet. Java makes it a bit easier to deploy threads, but it doesn't make designing threaded applications significantly easier, because the real design problems have to do with fundamental concurrency issues, and can't be magicked away by a language like Java. In some respects, Java can make things worse because it's not always possible to tell except by trial and error what the concurrency behavior of some of its library routines is.
Please explain why you think Linux is a bad choice for say, the Tivo video recorder, or might not be a better choice than Windows for car automation.
People port Linux to different platforms for the same reason that people are interested in using it for embedded applications: because the source code is open, can be customized as needed, and because it's extremely configurable.
Point me to the wonderful open source embedded OS that you have in mind, and perhaps we'll all start using it.
That's true. Of course, sale clerks at most stores don't often actually check the signature carefully, and if the store is found negligent, the card company can refuse to pay. Even so, banks absorb the costs far more often in these cases, so I'm sure you're right that they have an incentive to promote e-commerce (although the same applied to good old pre-Internet mail order.)
But in fact, it seems to me that in almost all cases, much fraud could be prevented by merchants. Simply checking all signatures, or only shipping to addresses registered with the credit card company, would eliminate a lot of fraud that currently happens. It comes down to the fact that merchants don't want to appear not to trust their customers - it's not good for business.
Anti-fraud measures like computerized detection of unusual buying patterns has helped a lot, though. Last time I saw a figure, approximately 0.08% of the dollar value of all card charges were fraudulent. This used to be closer to 0.2%.
Of course, you can't use this as a way to cheat merchants - you might get away with it once or twice, but if it became clear that that's what you were doing, your card could be cancelled and your credit rating would suffer.
Do you mean a full-time on-staff employee? What would they do all day? Install a router and/or firewall properly, and you're pretty much done except for the occasional downtime, at which point you call your provider. I've never heard of a company with a single frac- or full-T having a full-time maintainer. They'd have a heck of a lot of free time on their hands!
Too bad most companies have a vision only slightly longer than the end of their eyelashes.
At least some criticism of management comes from not understanding the financial realities of running a profitable business. This seems to be an example of that.
If I steal Shoeboy's credit card number (assuming she actually had one) by hacking into shoeboy.com (assuming there was actually something there to hack into), and use it to purchase an imperial ton of grits (the hot kind, naturally), it is the merchant who sold me the grits that will be out of pocket when the theft is discovered. The credit card company checks with the cardholder, and if the cardholder denies having purchased the items in question, the grits merchant doesn't get paid. Shoeboy wouldn't lose a dime.
This puts the onus on the merchant to verify that they are dealing with a legitimate customer, which is why many online companies won't ship to addresses not registered with the card company, especially when dealing with a first-time customer.
So, Shoeboy's statement, "Anyone who buys anything online is a fucking moron", might be applied to merchants who sell things online - or more to the point, their investors! - but not to cardholders. Someone buying something online with a credit card is actually being pretty smart. The only downside when your card or card number is stolen tends to be minor inconvenience.
In addition, if you're not happy with a product, and the merchant doesn't want to give you your money back, within reason, card companies will refund your money and stiff the merchant. I've had that happen when purchasing telephony hardware from a company that went out of business right after shipping my product - the company couldn't be reached for support, so I called Amex and they credited me the money.
Now, with Shoeboy, you can never really tell whether she's trolling or not, so maybe she already knows all this. But I post this purely out of the altruistic knowledge that I am contributing to the free and pure flow of e-commerce. Bezos would thank me, if his company weren't tanking...
It's simple: when you sell a product like this that's not a mass market product, dropping the price, on its own, doesn't necessarily increase sales enough to compensate. There's a sweet spot on the price vs. demand curve, and almost invariably, for "niche" products, that spot is going to be at a higher price than it is for similar consumer-level products, for the simple reason that the product itself is never going to sell as well as say, Quake.
I think the Heston reference must be tongue in cheek. Moore refers to his movie as an "epic". Heston is famous for his roles in epic movies like Ben Hur, or wannabe epics like most of his other movies. In Soylent Green, Heston gives a performance of unsurpassed hamminess - surely its mention is a clue that this is a joke?
Even a superficial analysis of the issues surrronding intellectual property makes it clear that those issues are far from simple, and that the current attitudes towards IP in the legal and commercial sphere are often hard to justify. In many cases, especially related to patent law, those who benefit from intellectual property law do so at the expense of the public domain, and could just as easily be labeled pirates.
In this specific case, I agree that what Hughes did was perfectly acceptable and well within their moral, ethical, and legal rights. However, so were the actions of the original hackers of the system. Things get a bit more questionable when it comes to people simply buying a hacked chip to avoid service fees, but even there, "piracy" is not the appropriate term.
The original message was correct: this was a nice piece of reporting for /., although I wouldn't have minded some more technical details.
I've used many of the trackballs mentioned on this page, including the Kensington, other Logitechs, etc. The Logitech Marble FX and its successor, the cordless TrackMan FX, are in a class of their own, and leave the others in their dust in terms of feel, control and precision. If you've ever found a thumb-driven trackball to be hard to control precisely, the FX is the answer - you can use any or all of your first three fingers, and your thumb too if you like.
As an added bonus, if you appreciate good design, this trackball is unusual-looking enough to have been used in the Sci-Fi channel TV series "Farscape" as a navigational control on the spaceship "Moya". Of course they tricked it out with a bit of paint and stuff first.
One drawback to be aware of: I don't know if there's a left-handed version, but if not, left-handers are out of luck since it's shape makes use with the left hand nearly impossible.
Looking at Logitech's site just now, I see that the Marble FX isn't listed anymore, but the cordless TrackMan FX is.
[...]
Perpetuating ignoprance helps no one.
I agree, in general. However, I think one can reasonably make the argument that the negative connotations associated with the word "nigger" are such that similar words should be avoided, not only in the interests of humoring the less well-educated, but also to avoid any appearance of having deliberately chosen a word that evokes another, more insulting word.
I'm not a big fan of "political correctness", but I do recognize that it serves a purpose as a kind of mindless set of rules for people who may not be intimately familiar with all the issues in a given situation and able to decide on their own what is and isn't politically appropriate in that situation. I did say that "to be politically correct one has to avoid not just racism, but the appearance of racism", and I think that's true. If one is ignoring political correctness, though, in favor of following one's own conscience, then the logic you've laid out applies.
My uncle used to talk just the way you do. He recently committed suicide. Your fanatic behavior is most likely symptomatic of mental illness. I wish you well in dealing with it.
The interesting upshot of all this, though, is that when you get right down to it, to be politically correct one has to avoid not just racism, but the appearance of racism. Which means avoiding words like niggle and niggardly, at least in the U.S., is probably a good idea.
It's a form of social oppression, but that's one of the less onerous consequences of ones ancestors having enslaved people.
There are other English-speaking countries than the big four you mentioned. Where I grew up, I remember going to the store for pints of milk when I was about 6. But it all switched to SI shortly after that, milk switched to liters, pounds to kilograms, etc. The only Imperial unit I retained any kind of intuitive appreciation of was the pint. (Comes in handy in bars!)
I live in the US now and have had to absorb a knowledge of pounds, etc. but when I first came over, I found the units meaningless. Multiplying by a factor in your head is a poor substitute for an intuitive understanding of what a number representing a weight means. I know exactly what Michael JasonSmith means, and would find it similarly annoying to read a book about topics like physics which wasn't in SI units.
which is that fluency in English includes a basic familiarity with the peculiar units of measurement used in everyday life in the largest English-speaking countries
I find this a truly astonishing position to take. You might as well say that fluency in English requires a familiarity with the structure of the British aristocracy. Or a familiarity with the vocabulary of Chaucer. WTF???
Are you sure your position isn't just one of "I had to learn these dumb units so everyone else should do the same"?
You have it totally backwards. If you must indulge your fantasies, don't put them above family and friends - that would qualify as an addiction. I would refer you to Alcoholics Anonymous, except they share the same silly fantasy. I guess you're stuck...
Well, I was being serious about looking forward to a lesson. I don't recall ever having heard or read the rule about this. Just about all I know about written English I learned from reading fiction, my schoolteachers certainly weren't any help.