I don't know anything about Hungarian, but English is Borg-like: it absorbs just about anything. (Although I personally draw the line at devolvation!)
I suspect the only real constraint is that the language doesn't change so fast that it leaves older speakers completely unable to communicate with younger ones. But if you consider that e.g. British, American, Australian, and South African English speakers are all able to communicate quite effectively with each other without resorting to pidgin, there doesn't seem much danger of that.
Er, what kinda ignorance is that? The kind which doesn't recognize that Ebonics is in fact part of a grand cultural and phonic tradition stretching all the way back to the days of American slavery? This raises an interesting etho-political dilemma: can an idea ever be so bad that using a racial slur to describe it is justified?
Of course, if you just use "Prince" by itself, one can't tell whether you perhaps just didn't notice Prince's monikerial progression. For completeness, it is recommended that he be referred to as in the following example:
"The artist once known by an unpronounceable glyph, known also as The Artist, formerly known as The Artist formerly known as Prince, formerly known as Prince, now known again as Prince, released a new album today. As usual, it sucks."
Sometimes, as in the case of Waxman (my rep), he interviewed the "challenger" because the incumbent couldn't be bothered to interview.;)
"Couldn't be bothered" is not an accurate characterization. Many politicians are afraid to go on Stephen Colbert. Nancy Pelosi has advised Democrats not to appear. Similar admonitions have gone out on the Republican side. These people don't really understand the show, or the younger-than-them generations which watch it, so all they see is people being made fun of and they can't understand how that could possible help a candidate. So a better characterization would be "chicken" or maybe "shit-scared".
It gets especially silly when they get into pronunciation. Is Qatar "cutter", "cotter", "gutter", "catarrh", or one of the variations that can't even be spelled out using ordinary English letters? This is important, people. We need the one true proncunciation so that Wolf Blitzer doesn't feel stupid when reading the teleprompter.
No, I'm betting that this quirk is widely supported enough that my chances are better than 90%. Of course, if I spotted some exotic machine or maybe a Plan 9 manual on his desk, I might be less sanguine. But I really should have fessed up and included a comment about portability in the code.
In one stroke, you not only showed up the OP, you also proved wrong those who said it couldn't be done. Bravo!
(Incidentally, that approach wouldn't have occurred to me, despite years of C wrangling.:)
Thanks! It probably helps that I've studied some programming language semantics, starting with SICP, which incidentally, I first heard about here on/. Highly recommended as a starting point for anyone who wants to arm themselves against interviewers like the OP.;)
"Proof" is a word more appropriate to mathematics than science. Best we can do is theories, evidence, and argument, and we already have plenty of that, and the direction it points is pretty clear.
But can you point me towards the proposals you're referring to? That sounded like a prediction fabricated by the Bush/Cheney/Halliburton Oil Wealth Preservation Think Tank to me. I recall hearing similar objections every time they amend the Clean Air Act, and guess what, we have cleaner air now and the economy still muddles along somehow. Besides, your position seems contradictory: on the one hand, you're waiting for philosophically untenable "proof", and on the other hand, you already know what it's going to take to fix the problem which you're not yet convinced exists?
In general, the 6 billion humans on Earth are consuming resources without properly accounting for the costs of that in a variety of ways. A 6-cent tax on gasoline would certainly be way too low. However, the U.S. has recently weathered an increase in the price of gas up to 16 times that amount, in a short space of time, while financing a ridiculously expensive and unnecessary war.
With an appropriate adjustment of priorities, there's a great deal that could be done to begin improving the situation and start moving in the right direction. When you're piloting a supertanker and you see icebergs ahead, you start turning, you don't just say "well let's get closer to make sure we're really going to hit them, and then try to execute an impossible turn at the last possible moment."
Global warming doesn't "have to either be universally accepted or flat-out debunked". However, there's plenty of good, solid evidence in favor of the following points:
Global warming will be a problem for humans in the not-too-distant future (if not already)
Humans may be contributing to global warming
Time is not on our side
So, there are potentially some big stakes, beyond the politics, in acting now based on what we consider the most likely conclusions, even if there's still uncertainty in some areas.
Brandt apparently only checked 12,000 articles, so that makes it about 1.2%. It's still pretty good for such an open resource, and it's not clear to me what Brandt's criticism really is — it seems more like a smear attempt. It's not as though Wikipedia is embracing plagiarism and refusing to do anything about it.
Daniel Brandt, valuable Wikipedia contributor
on
Wikipedia and Plagiarism
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Brandt is doing a great service to Wikipedia — checking for and reporting plagiarism. That takes dedication and hard work. It's ironic that he feels the need to present it as criticims of Wikipedia's model, when in fact he's demonstrating the power of contributions from many people with different motivations. Even if the motivation is anti-Wikipedia, Wikipedia just absorbs the input and grows stronger.
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine..." -- Obi Wiki-nobi
But as hardware gets fast enough that most common tasks can be run at a one-millionth slowdown and still run fine, we will get to a point where we can write glue code that runs some other piece of code, throws away 99.9% of its computation, and only uses the rest, simply because of the value of human time vs. computer time. I have written code like this.
You're not alone. Much of the early Internet was based on code like this: CGI scripts where one program shelled out to another executable just to access a small part of its functionality. That's still a big driver of server architecture, having a big effect on the popularity of tools like PHP which tend to embrace such integration, and inhibiting the success of monolithic multithreaded server approaches.
Yes, I'd say there's a big difference. In 2000, roughly half of those who voted, voted for Bush, so it's not as if he imposed himself via military force. The fact that the final decision in 2000 was kicked up and down through the court system, and that an armed coup didn't result, is testament to the stability of the U.S. democracy. Democracy means that people argue with each other about what's best for their country, and the process isn't always pretty. It's much easier just to cede power to a dictator and hope like hell that you won't be one of the ones who suffers as a result.
Democracy in the U.S. is experiencing some serious challenges, but a large component of that is a response to an external threat, and to an attack which permanently destroyed notions of peace and safety which many people held. That kind of thing is difficult for any nation or political system to deal with, especially when that threat is as nebulous as the one which faces the U.S. The interesting test will be to see what happens this Tuesday, and in the next Presidential election, and further into the future as one of the world's largest democracies continues to balance the interests of 300 million people without resorting to using military force on its own people.
Yes, I saw that. However, the U.S. is a very large country, with significant diversity in attitudes in different regions. If you paid any attention to my post (i.e. please pay attention before scolding), you'll see that I raised the issue of greater tolerance of racial diversity in the New York area, for example. It's quite possible that the other poster was born and grew up somewhere near Atlanta, for all we know from his postings, and that could result in a significantly different experience than he might have had in some other places in the U.S.
That said, I'm not trying to deny his experience, just pointing out that he may be generalizing further than his experience warrants.
I haven't lived out of the country and I'm genuinly curious about what other slashdotters would consider good places to live. Within reason, no secret lairs on Skullcrusher Mountain or anything.
Well, I was going to invite you to come and live in my secret lair on Skullcrusher Mountain, but apparently that's not good enough for you.
Assurances of the politeness of the people using at least the threat of their force of arms to achieve their political ends does not carry much weight with me. I've lived in a police state (apartheid South Africa), and the military police there were also polite, except when they wanted to arrest you.
You mentioned the common man feeling no impact: I agree, that's often the case. However, the common man is not usually the first to experience problems: that falls to the person who for whatever reason, is not common. The reason for non-commonality can be simple and relatively obvious, such as the colour of skin, or gender, or sexual orientation, or less obvious, such as holding unusual social or political beliefs. And in the situations which can thus arise, relying on the politeness of the military police is not a good strategy.
Simple fact: Thai military police are more competent and polite,even while executing coup, than Americans.
By generalizing like this, you make the same basic mistake as every American who has ever generalized about your daughter based on the color of her skin.
I'm curious now as to how wide your experience in the U.S. is, since you mention flying into Atlanta. My own prejudices tell me that the southern U.S. is not the most obvious place to find a great deal of tolerance of diversity. A friend of mine who is married to an Asian woman moved to the NYC metro area a couple of decades back because they felt that they would experience acceptance rather than discrimination there, and that turned out to be true. Other friends of mine have found areas of states like California and Oregon far more tolerant of religious diversity.
The truth, as others have pointed out, is that you'll find xenophobia, ignorance, and outright stupidity anywhere in the world -- at least, I've lived in four countries on three continents, and that's been my experience. You'll also encounter accidents of history which affect how the people around you treat you: 9/11 was one such. Your choice, for your particular circumstances, may be perfectly sensible. But you now seem to be doing a lot of sweeping generalization. The fact that you've managed to travel without incident, presumably as a tourist, in and out of a number of countries is not really evidence of very much, for example.
Hmm, well, your requirements are presumably different than mine. Peru is just coming out of having been a police state run by a dictator, and Thailand has just suffered a coup. Perhaps you have some idea that the political environment is unimportant as long as people can live their lives reasonably unfettered, or something, but my experience points in the other direction.
At least when the ninja flips out and kills you, you'll be comforted by the knowledge that no-one will be able to get at your files. Unless they know anything about PCs, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know anything about Hungarian, but English is Borg-like: it absorbs just about anything. (Although I personally draw the line at devolvation!)
I suspect the only real constraint is that the language doesn't change so fast that it leaves older speakers completely unable to communicate with younger ones. But if you consider that e.g. British, American, Australian, and South African English speakers are all able to communicate quite effectively with each other without resorting to pidgin, there doesn't seem much danger of that.
You're clearly European. In America, they dictionarize words. Dictionarify sounds totally gay... or worse, French.
Er, what kinda ignorance is that? The kind which doesn't recognize that Ebonics is in fact part of a grand cultural and phonic tradition stretching all the way back to the days of American slavery? This raises an interesting etho-political dilemma: can an idea ever be so bad that using a racial slur to describe it is justified?
Of course, if you just use "Prince" by itself, one can't tell whether you perhaps just didn't notice Prince's monikerial progression. For completeness, it is recommended that he be referred to as in the following example:
"The artist once known by an unpronounceable glyph, known also as The Artist, formerly known as The Artist formerly known as Prince, formerly known as Prince, now known again as Prince, released a new album today. As usual, it sucks."
If you're willing to wait in line for over a week to buy a game console, you're not smart enough to think of preordering.
That, or you're being paid by Sony (to make it appear that the retard community is desparate for PS3s?)
When a disabled ninja flips out, he doesn't kill people, he just maims them.
It gets especially silly when they get into pronunciation. Is Qatar "cutter", "cotter", "gutter", "catarrh", or one of the variations that can't even be spelled out using ordinary English letters? This is important, people. We need the one true proncunciation so that Wolf Blitzer doesn't feel stupid when reading the teleprompter.
No, I'm betting that this quirk is widely supported enough that my chances are better than 90%. Of course, if I spotted some exotic machine or maybe a Plan 9 manual on his desk, I might be less sanguine. But I really should have fessed up and included a comment about portability in the code.
The original problem statement didn't say the solution had to be portable. :) Afaik, this'll work under most mainstream C compilers, though.
"Proof" is a word more appropriate to mathematics than science. Best we can do is theories, evidence, and argument, and we already have plenty of that, and the direction it points is pretty clear.
But can you point me towards the proposals you're referring to? That sounded like a prediction fabricated by the Bush/Cheney/Halliburton Oil Wealth Preservation Think Tank to me. I recall hearing similar objections every time they amend the Clean Air Act, and guess what, we have cleaner air now and the economy still muddles along somehow. Besides, your position seems contradictory: on the one hand, you're waiting for philosophically untenable "proof", and on the other hand, you already know what it's going to take to fix the problem which you're not yet convinced exists?
In general, the 6 billion humans on Earth are consuming resources without properly accounting for the costs of that in a variety of ways. A 6-cent tax on gasoline would certainly be way too low. However, the U.S. has recently weathered an increase in the price of gas up to 16 times that amount, in a short space of time, while financing a ridiculously expensive and unnecessary war.
With an appropriate adjustment of priorities, there's a great deal that could be done to begin improving the situation and start moving in the right direction. When you're piloting a supertanker and you see icebergs ahead, you start turning, you don't just say "well let's get closer to make sure we're really going to hit them, and then try to execute an impossible turn at the last possible moment."
How about:
BTW, as someone else pointed out, your solution is wrong. There's clearly only one thing for you to do now: hire me, and fire yourself.
Global warming doesn't "have to either be universally accepted or flat-out debunked". However, there's plenty of good, solid evidence in favor of the following points:
So, there are potentially some big stakes, beyond the politics, in acting now based on what we consider the most likely conclusions, even if there's still uncertainty in some areas.
Brandt apparently only checked 12,000 articles, so that makes it about 1.2%. It's still pretty good for such an open resource, and it's not clear to me what Brandt's criticism really is — it seems more like a smear attempt. It's not as though Wikipedia is embracing plagiarism and refusing to do anything about it.
Brandt is doing a great service to Wikipedia — checking for and reporting plagiarism. That takes dedication and hard work. It's ironic that he feels the need to present it as criticims of Wikipedia's model, when in fact he's demonstrating the power of contributions from many people with different motivations. Even if the motivation is anti-Wikipedia, Wikipedia just absorbs the input and grows stronger.
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine..." -- Obi Wiki-nobi
Yes, I'd say there's a big difference. In 2000, roughly half of those who voted, voted for Bush, so it's not as if he imposed himself via military force. The fact that the final decision in 2000 was kicked up and down through the court system, and that an armed coup didn't result, is testament to the stability of the U.S. democracy. Democracy means that people argue with each other about what's best for their country, and the process isn't always pretty. It's much easier just to cede power to a dictator and hope like hell that you won't be one of the ones who suffers as a result.
Democracy in the U.S. is experiencing some serious challenges, but a large component of that is a response to an external threat, and to an attack which permanently destroyed notions of peace and safety which many people held. That kind of thing is difficult for any nation or political system to deal with, especially when that threat is as nebulous as the one which faces the U.S. The interesting test will be to see what happens this Tuesday, and in the next Presidential election, and further into the future as one of the world's largest democracies continues to balance the interests of 300 million people without resorting to using military force on its own people.
Yes, I saw that. However, the U.S. is a very large country, with significant diversity in attitudes in different regions. If you paid any attention to my post (i.e. please pay attention before scolding), you'll see that I raised the issue of greater tolerance of racial diversity in the New York area, for example. It's quite possible that the other poster was born and grew up somewhere near Atlanta, for all we know from his postings, and that could result in a significantly different experience than he might have had in some other places in the U.S.
That said, I'm not trying to deny his experience, just pointing out that he may be generalizing further than his experience warrants.
Assurances of the politeness of the people using at least the threat of their force of arms to achieve their political ends does not carry much weight with me. I've lived in a police state (apartheid South Africa), and the military police there were also polite, except when they wanted to arrest you.
You mentioned the common man feeling no impact: I agree, that's often the case. However, the common man is not usually the first to experience problems: that falls to the person who for whatever reason, is not common. The reason for non-commonality can be simple and relatively obvious, such as the colour of skin, or gender, or sexual orientation, or less obvious, such as holding unusual social or political beliefs. And in the situations which can thus arise, relying on the politeness of the military police is not a good strategy.
By generalizing like this, you make the same basic mistake as every American who has ever generalized about your daughter based on the color of her skin.
I'm curious now as to how wide your experience in the U.S. is, since you mention flying into Atlanta. My own prejudices tell me that the southern U.S. is not the most obvious place to find a great deal of tolerance of diversity. A friend of mine who is married to an Asian woman moved to the NYC metro area a couple of decades back because they felt that they would experience acceptance rather than discrimination there, and that turned out to be true. Other friends of mine have found areas of states like California and Oregon far more tolerant of religious diversity.
The truth, as others have pointed out, is that you'll find xenophobia, ignorance, and outright stupidity anywhere in the world -- at least, I've lived in four countries on three continents, and that's been my experience. You'll also encounter accidents of history which affect how the people around you treat you: 9/11 was one such. Your choice, for your particular circumstances, may be perfectly sensible. But you now seem to be doing a lot of sweeping generalization. The fact that you've managed to travel without incident, presumably as a tourist, in and out of a number of countries is not really evidence of very much, for example.
Hmm, well, your requirements are presumably different than mine. Peru is just coming out of having been a police state run by a dictator, and Thailand has just suffered a coup. Perhaps you have some idea that the political environment is unimportant as long as people can live their lives reasonably unfettered, or something, but my experience points in the other direction.
Out of curiousity, where did you move to?
At least when the ninja flips out and kills you, you'll be comforted by the knowledge that no-one will be able to get at your files. Unless they know anything about PCs, of course.