There's no reason why conjunctions can't join two sentences together.
Actually there is a reason: syntax. You may not accept it as a valid reason, but it does exist. As I see it, there two (incorrect) reasons to start a sentence with "but":
What is being treated as a sentence should have been a new clause of the previous sentence.
"But" is being used as a synonym for "however"
The comment I initially replied to would seem to fall into both categories (not at the same time) for the first use of "but". If it were used as a single sentence, it would have been fine (if you ignore other parts of the post). If "but" had been substituted for "however" it would also have been fine. However, without either of these being true, it is incorrect. In spoken language this distinction makes no difference, as the punctuation marks are not very well defined, but it does have some repercussions on the meaning of the words.
I been faithful supporter of Firefox for the last few years. But I do think that Microsoft did some major advancement with IE(after IE6).
This can be rephrased as either "I [have] been [a] faithful supporter of Firefox for the last few years, but I do think that Microsoft [made] some major advancement[s] with IE (after IE6)." or "I [have] been [a] faithful supporter of Firefox for the last few years. However, I do think that Microsoft [made] some major advancement[s] with IE (after IE6)." and still make grammatical sense. Both versions convey the same information, but have different emphasis and tone. Splitting it into two sentences emphasises the second statement as it makes Microsoft the subject of a sentence. The reason why using "but" in place of "however" is incorrect is to do with the relationship between written and spoken language. One of the main reasons written language has rules is so that it can effectively convey emotion etc. while retaining the same words used in spoken language. You cannot easily convey volume (loudness) or force in text, so grammatical rules evolved to compensate.
I do agree that they still have much to do. But saying in an absolute manner that it's insecure, that's something I don't agree with.
This can be rephrased as "I do agree that they still have much to do, but saying in an absolute manner that it's insecure; that's something I don't agree with." or "I do agree that they still have much to do. However, saying in an absolute manner that it's insecure; that's something I don't agree with.". Again there is a difference of emphasis, as well as a subtle difference in meaning and emotion. All that using "but" achieves is ambiguity.
Regardless of the reasons though, I really don't think you are the right person to be commenting on whether or not grammatical incorrectness matters. You are, after all, the same person that writes requests as questions, puts "and" and "but" at the beginning of paragraphs and sentences, and thinks that thoughts cannot be expressed without using "but" at the beginning of a sentence. You say that using a proper alternative to "but" can reduce impact, when in fact the word "but" carries little to no implied force and any that is perceived is due mainly to sentence structure and the fact that but is incorrect (it implies that the phrase is following from something but isn't). I mean no offence, but you are wrong.
I accidentally hit the submit button rather than continue editing. The third sentence should have been "If it helps you to understand it", not "If it helps to understand it", while the second paragraph should have read:
While on the subject of grammar, your first sentence isn't a question, so the question mark is also incorrect. What you did was make a request for information, not ask a question about it. If it were changed to "What is "improper" about using "but" at the beginning of a sentence?" then it would be a question. Both would have the same answer, but your version is not a question.
"But" is a conjunction, which means it can only be used to connect two parts of a sentence together, not start a new one*. Incidentally, "and" is also a conjunction, so your second sentence is also incorrect. If it helps to understand it, a sentence must make sense on it's own, otherwise it is incorrect**.
While on the subject of grammar, your first sentence isn't a question, so the question mark is also incorrect. What you did was make a request for information, not ask a question about it. If it were rephrased "What is what is "improper" about using "but" at the beginning of a sentence?" then it would be a question. Both would have the same answer, both your version is not a question.
*In the way I used it, "but" is the subject of the sentence, since I was talking about the word, not using the word to talk about something else.
**Please note that "must make sense on it's own" does not mean "can be fully understood out of context".
Aren't reading glasses for older people usually needed because of weakening muscles that control the lens? If that is the case, then no replacement lens would provide permanent relief from reading glasses (your ability to focus would continue to decrease after the replacement lens was fitted). I may be missing something though; I'm not exactly an expert on the eye.
It IS insecure, and has been shown to be time and time again. Microsoft have certainly made improvements, but that doesn't change the fact that it is insecure. No browser is 100% safe, but IE has a very bad track record.
Some people? Nobody should eat at Taco Bell, or any other fast food place, every day. Heck, anybody who eats the same thing everyday, no matter how nutritious it is, should stop. It just ain't healthy.
I was interpreting it as Meta-ethical relativism, rather than Normative relativism (as Wikipedia defines them, Meta-ethical is "all moral judgements have their origins either in societal or in individual standards, and that no single objective standard exists by which one can assess the truth of a moral proposition" while Normative is "as there is no universal moral standard by which to judge others, we ought to tolerate the behaviour of others even when it runs counter to our personal or cultural moral standards."). I can't honestly say that I know which the Pope was referring to, but that is how I interpreted it.
Under that definition, the idea that a god who dictates morality disintegrates. The concept of god may not be destroyed, but a great deal of religious dogma is, including the Popes divinity (or whatever it's called). If you no longer consider the Pope to be Gods messenger on Earth, then the influence he has on you becomes diminished, along with some of his overall power. In some cases, this may lead to a complete rejection of Catholicism (would also apply to any other religion where absolute morality is heavily preached, Islam would be a prime example) but is most likely to result in a weakening of faith, or transitioning to some other form of religion (deism, or belief in a non-specific theistic god).
I wasn't telling anyone to do anything. I could just have easily said "after someone has decided to accept relative morals as truth" and it would have meant more or less the same thing. Acceptance of something as truth doesn't necessarily mean that it is true.
Besides, it can only be relative or absolute. It cannot be "relative for you but not to them". Either it is absolute or not. You can have an opinion on the matter, but that doesn't make it true. Belief that certain moral positions correspond to an absolute moral code does not mean that the code exists.
Moral concensus != universal morals. There are certainly evolutionary reasons why we GENERALLY consider certain behaviour bad, but that does not make them universal or absolute. If that were the case, it would be impossible to disagree on these morals, which is patently false (there are MANY moral grey areas). Absolute morals have to be dictated by something, be it a universal constant akin to the speed of light or Pi, or a god.
Also, a lot of it is cultural. If a culture has no consept of possession, then stealing ceases to be considered immoral within that culture (as it ceases to have any meaning). Possession is perhaps a bad example, as humans are generally driven to want things for themselves (for evolutionary survival reasons presumably) so such a culture is unlikelly to evolve within humanity, but the point still stands.
Plus the whole "moral relativism" thing. Once people accept that morals are relative, the idea that there is a god who dictates morality disintegrates, along with some of the Popes power/influence.
While we don't do it for pornography or tobacco, in the UK it is legal to drink beer and other alcoholic beverages of similar strength from the age of 5 as long as the young person doing so is on private property and is supervised by an adult. In pubs etc you can drink from 16 if ordered with food (although the pub requires a special licence) or without food from 18. The rest of Europe seems pretty similar, having general drinking ages from 16-18 (occasionaly with higher restrictions on spirits etc). Serbia and Albania don't even have age restrictions.
That said, the UK does have the highest rate of of binge drinking in Europe...although considering the similarity in the drinking ages etc, I think that might be cultural rather than legal.
Regardless, it seems parallel to the USA/Europe comparison for age of concent, and in both cases the US seems overly restrictive. Why is a 17 year-old incapable of making an infomed decision about sex (ignoring abstinence-only education for a moment)?
While triple monitors is awesome, it doesn't solve the problem of DPI. The complaint here is that the pixel density of modern screens is not nearly as high as Mr. Brown wants it to be. If you think about it, in most screens it's barely changed at all since LCDs became mainstream. My first LCD was a 1280x1024 17 incher. At the moment I use a 1920x1200 24". My original works out at just over 95dpi, while my current one works out at just under 94dpi - I have increased my screen real estate, and the size of my screen, but the DPI is about the same.
Fair enough. It's just I got an email about it saying the SCEA was changing their agreement blah, blah, blah, dispite having a UK account, so within the SCEE jurisdiction (or whatever word applies). Perhaps it's because I've logged in with my PSN details to us.playstation.com before or something (or perhaps they just used the SCEA one for english language speakers and forgot to change it to SCEE).
This is a SCEA EULA, yet still seems to apply to users outside North America?
Also, this is NOT related to the firmware update - it is a general EULA for PlayStation products. It seeks to apply whether you install or not...and applies to PSPs. All in all, it's quite worrying - hope it's not a precursor to a paid PSN.
The PS3's CPU has one PPE and eight SPEs, one of which is disabled, and one of which is used by the operating system, leaving six for game development. The PPE is a PowerPC and its main job is to shovel data to the SPEs... if they are being used. Some of the weaker titles use the PPE for almost everything (except graphics, being handled by the GPU) and use one or two SPEs as if they were a math coprocessor... which I guess they are.
That's pretty much what I meant by it not having a conventional CPU. The PPE may be a conventional CPU more or less, but as a whole the cell is not.
There's certainly games with procedural texturing. Creating these textures is going to be more or less done with the SPEs by anyone competent. It involves shoveling code and data at them and then standing back and waiting for the results to come back, then once they have returned, retrieving them and shoving them into a buffer in graphics memory, which unlike on the Xbox is a distinct and physically separate region/block of memory. So yes, the PPE will have something to do in this context, but it's just acting as a switchboard operator.
True, but I was more talking about anisotropic filtering etc. I'm fairly sure Uncharted, and probably ofther games to, uses one of the SPEs for texture filtering (probably among other things, I can't imagine it hakes THAT much processing time...of course I'm not a graphics programmer, so I may well be mistaken). Given what I know of anisotropic filtering, it would have to be done for each viewpoint separatelly no? As I said though, I'm no graphics programmer (or a programmer at all really - I do some web stuff but thats about it).
Bear in mind that when I say "the CPU", I mean the whole Cell rather than the PPE, like a kind of multi-core CPU if you will, albeit one which has a main core and sub-cores. By the way you described it "The GPU is working on rendering while the CPU is doing something else", I thought you were as well. Regardless, All I really meant by it was that it isn't always the GPUs task to do every graphics related task. Also, as the AC who also replied to this said:
...modern games do a lot of vertex processing, and sometimes pixel post-processing too, is done on the SPUs
That's the kind of thing I meant (although I wan't aware those specifc things). Of course that will not be effected by AI calculations if distributed properly, but it may have some ramifications.
That actually depends on the game. The PS3 doesn't have a traditional CPU, and most of the really nice looking PS3 games use various parts of the cell for graphics (be it texture processing, or physics, or whatever). The cell isn't used for actual rendering, but it does affect many games graphics.
That said, some of those functions will be irrelevent, as the calculations will apply to both frames (or both views of the same frame if you want to look at it like that). Physics for example is, if I'm understanding it correctly, is related to object position per frame (and effects like motion blur) so would apply largely, if not completely, to both frames. Texture processing on the other hand may not, depending on the game. Your point certainly holds up for AI, in the same way as physics, but you can't say for every game that the CPU has no effect.
I would say the only real way to send them the message is to litterally send them a message. Don't buy the game, and tell them that you didn't because of the DRM. That way, they can't say "look, that person didn't buy it - he must have pirated it" and they can't say "people aren't buying it - we didn't market it enough" - it's the only way the loss of a sale can have any meaningful impact and can't be attributed to something else.
Couldn't tell ya, as I don't know the details of that, but from a quick google it seems that they can't face no repurcussions - they were ordered to pay the family several million dollars (~$10mil I think). Don't think that kind of thing would come under freedom of speech anyway, but rather right to protest (and when and where that right extends).
I think you're correct - at least thats my understanding of the US legal system. Honestly, I can see merits in both systems - in the US you have full freedom of speech while in Europe (generally speaking - it is a continent, not a country after all) you have the right to not be harrassed or discriminated against. I also think both tread a fine line between freedom and something very bad. The US version is on the good side of the line that crosses into segregation, while the European one stays on the good side of a 1984 situation (everything being controlled). Honestly I think the European system is better as-is, as it protects more than it supresses freedom.
As far as I know, in the UK at least, you can't sue for being insulted. You can if the comments made were racist, sexist, homophobic etc, but not simply insulting. You could possibly have them charged with verbal assault though. Also, as has already been mentioned, slander and offensivness do cross over from time to time, but are separate.
Well sorry if I came off as "I am right - you suck at jokes". I was in kinda a bad mood yesterday, so it probably came through in my posts. I think I need to get more sleep. Anyway, I still don't think it was funny - replacing words with silly alternatives just doesn't resonate with me (seems on the same level as "your mum" jokes) and I'm not a fan of the "I fixed that for you" meme, but I was a little harsh and aggressive I must admit. I honestly wasn't sure at the time if you were serious or not though...probably lack of sleep again there.
Apart from the fact that that is how the US Navy designates them, how are you defining ship and boat? As far as I'm aware the only distinction that you can make with any certainty is that ships are bigger than boats. By that definition, I would personally say that military subs classify as ships (I think they're big enough).
Slashdot Mirror
There's no reason why conjunctions can't join two sentences together.
Actually there is a reason: syntax. You may not accept it as a valid reason, but it does exist. As I see it, there two (incorrect) reasons to start a sentence with "but":
The comment I initially replied to would seem to fall into both categories (not at the same time) for the first use of "but". If it were used as a single sentence, it would have been fine (if you ignore other parts of the post). If "but" had been substituted for "however" it would also have been fine. However, without either of these being true, it is incorrect. In spoken language this distinction makes no difference, as the punctuation marks are not very well defined, but it does have some repercussions on the meaning of the words.
I been faithful supporter of Firefox for the last few years. But I do think that Microsoft did some major advancement with IE(after IE6).
This can be rephrased as either "I [have] been [a] faithful supporter of Firefox for the last few years, but I do think that Microsoft [made] some major advancement[s] with IE (after IE6)." or "I [have] been [a] faithful supporter of Firefox for the last few years. However, I do think that Microsoft [made] some major advancement[s] with IE (after IE6)." and still make grammatical sense. Both versions convey the same information, but have different emphasis and tone. Splitting it into two sentences emphasises the second statement as it makes Microsoft the subject of a sentence. The reason why using "but" in place of "however" is incorrect is to do with the relationship between written and spoken language. One of the main reasons written language has rules is so that it can effectively convey emotion etc. while retaining the same words used in spoken language. You cannot easily convey volume (loudness) or force in text, so grammatical rules evolved to compensate.
I do agree that they still have much to do. But saying in an absolute manner that it's insecure, that's something I don't agree with.
This can be rephrased as "I do agree that they still have much to do, but saying in an absolute manner that it's insecure; that's something I don't agree with." or "I do agree that they still have much to do. However, saying in an absolute manner that it's insecure; that's something I don't agree with.". Again there is a difference of emphasis, as well as a subtle difference in meaning and emotion. All that using "but" achieves is ambiguity.
Regardless of the reasons though, I really don't think you are the right person to be commenting on whether or not grammatical incorrectness matters. You are, after all, the same person that writes requests as questions, puts "and" and "but" at the beginning of paragraphs and sentences, and thinks that thoughts cannot be expressed without using "but" at the beginning of a sentence. You say that using a proper alternative to "but" can reduce impact, when in fact the word "but" carries little to no implied force and any that is perceived is due mainly to sentence structure and the fact that but is incorrect (it implies that the phrase is following from something but isn't). I mean no offence, but you are wrong.
While on the subject of grammar, your first sentence isn't a question, so the question mark is also incorrect. What you did was make a request for information, not ask a question about it. If it were changed to "What is "improper" about using "but" at the beginning of a sentence?" then it would be a question. Both would have the same answer, but your version is not a question.
"But" is a conjunction, which means it can only be used to connect two parts of a sentence together, not start a new one*. Incidentally, "and" is also a conjunction, so your second sentence is also incorrect. If it helps to understand it, a sentence must make sense on it's own, otherwise it is incorrect**.
While on the subject of grammar, your first sentence isn't a question, so the question mark is also incorrect. What you did was make a request for information, not ask a question about it. If it were rephrased "What is what is "improper" about using "but" at the beginning of a sentence?" then it would be a question. Both would have the same answer, both your version is not a question.
*In the way I used it, "but" is the subject of the sentence, since I was talking about the word, not using the word to talk about something else.
**Please note that "must make sense on it's own" does not mean "can be fully understood out of context".
Aren't reading glasses for older people usually needed because of weakening muscles that control the lens? If that is the case, then no replacement lens would provide permanent relief from reading glasses (your ability to focus would continue to decrease after the replacement lens was fitted). I may be missing something though; I'm not exactly an expert on the eye.
It IS insecure, and has been shown to be time and time again. Microsoft have certainly made improvements, but that doesn't change the fact that it is insecure. No browser is 100% safe, but IE has a very bad track record.
P.S. NEVER start a sentence with "but".
Some people? Nobody should eat at Taco Bell, or any other fast food place, every day. Heck, anybody who eats the same thing everyday, no matter how nutritious it is, should stop. It just ain't healthy.
I was interpreting it as Meta-ethical relativism, rather than Normative relativism (as Wikipedia defines them, Meta-ethical is "all moral judgements have their origins either in societal or in individual standards, and that no single objective standard exists by which one can assess the truth of a moral proposition" while Normative is "as there is no universal moral standard by which to judge others, we ought to tolerate the behaviour of others even when it runs counter to our personal or cultural moral standards."). I can't honestly say that I know which the Pope was referring to, but that is how I interpreted it.
Under that definition, the idea that a god who dictates morality disintegrates. The concept of god may not be destroyed, but a great deal of religious dogma is, including the Popes divinity (or whatever it's called). If you no longer consider the Pope to be Gods messenger on Earth, then the influence he has on you becomes diminished, along with some of his overall power. In some cases, this may lead to a complete rejection of Catholicism (would also apply to any other religion where absolute morality is heavily preached, Islam would be a prime example) but is most likely to result in a weakening of faith, or transitioning to some other form of religion (deism, or belief in a non-specific theistic god).
I wasn't telling anyone to do anything. I could just have easily said "after someone has decided to accept relative morals as truth" and it would have meant more or less the same thing. Acceptance of something as truth doesn't necessarily mean that it is true.
Besides, it can only be relative or absolute. It cannot be "relative for you but not to them". Either it is absolute or not. You can have an opinion on the matter, but that doesn't make it true. Belief that certain moral positions correspond to an absolute moral code does not mean that the code exists.
Moral concensus != universal morals. There are certainly evolutionary reasons why we GENERALLY consider certain behaviour bad, but that does not make them universal or absolute. If that were the case, it would be impossible to disagree on these morals, which is patently false (there are MANY moral grey areas). Absolute morals have to be dictated by something, be it a universal constant akin to the speed of light or Pi, or a god.
Also, a lot of it is cultural. If a culture has no consept of possession, then stealing ceases to be considered immoral within that culture (as it ceases to have any meaning). Possession is perhaps a bad example, as humans are generally driven to want things for themselves (for evolutionary survival reasons presumably) so such a culture is unlikelly to evolve within humanity, but the point still stands.
Plus the whole "moral relativism" thing. Once people accept that morals are relative, the idea that there is a god who dictates morality disintegrates, along with some of the Popes power/influence.
While we don't do it for pornography or tobacco, in the UK it is legal to drink beer and other alcoholic beverages of similar strength from the age of 5 as long as the young person doing so is on private property and is supervised by an adult. In pubs etc you can drink from 16 if ordered with food (although the pub requires a special licence) or without food from 18. The rest of Europe seems pretty similar, having general drinking ages from 16-18 (occasionaly with higher restrictions on spirits etc). Serbia and Albania don't even have age restrictions.
That said, the UK does have the highest rate of of binge drinking in Europe...although considering the similarity in the drinking ages etc, I think that might be cultural rather than legal.
Regardless, it seems parallel to the USA/Europe comparison for age of concent, and in both cases the US seems overly restrictive. Why is a 17 year-old incapable of making an infomed decision about sex (ignoring abstinence-only education for a moment)?
While triple monitors is awesome, it doesn't solve the problem of DPI. The complaint here is that the pixel density of modern screens is not nearly as high as Mr. Brown wants it to be. If you think about it, in most screens it's barely changed at all since LCDs became mainstream. My first LCD was a 1280x1024 17 incher. At the moment I use a 1920x1200 24". My original works out at just over 95dpi, while my current one works out at just under 94dpi - I have increased my screen real estate, and the size of my screen, but the DPI is about the same.
Fair enough. It's just I got an email about it saying the SCEA was changing their agreement blah, blah, blah, dispite having a UK account, so within the SCEE jurisdiction (or whatever word applies). Perhaps it's because I've logged in with my PSN details to us.playstation.com before or something (or perhaps they just used the SCEA one for english language speakers and forgot to change it to SCEE).
This is a SCEA EULA, yet still seems to apply to users outside North America? Also, this is NOT related to the firmware update - it is a general EULA for PlayStation products. It seeks to apply whether you install or not...and applies to PSPs. All in all, it's quite worrying - hope it's not a precursor to a paid PSN.
The PS3's CPU has one PPE and eight SPEs, one of which is disabled, and one of which is used by the operating system, leaving six for game development. The PPE is a PowerPC and its main job is to shovel data to the SPEs... if they are being used. Some of the weaker titles use the PPE for almost everything (except graphics, being handled by the GPU) and use one or two SPEs as if they were a math coprocessor... which I guess they are.
That's pretty much what I meant by it not having a conventional CPU. The PPE may be a conventional CPU more or less, but as a whole the cell is not.
There's certainly games with procedural texturing. Creating these textures is going to be more or less done with the SPEs by anyone competent. It involves shoveling code and data at them and then standing back and waiting for the results to come back, then once they have returned, retrieving them and shoving them into a buffer in graphics memory, which unlike on the Xbox is a distinct and physically separate region/block of memory. So yes, the PPE will have something to do in this context, but it's just acting as a switchboard operator.
True, but I was more talking about anisotropic filtering etc. I'm fairly sure Uncharted, and probably ofther games to, uses one of the SPEs for texture filtering (probably among other things, I can't imagine it hakes THAT much processing time...of course I'm not a graphics programmer, so I may well be mistaken). Given what I know of anisotropic filtering, it would have to be done for each viewpoint separatelly no? As I said though, I'm no graphics programmer (or a programmer at all really - I do some web stuff but thats about it).
Bear in mind that when I say "the CPU", I mean the whole Cell rather than the PPE, like a kind of multi-core CPU if you will, albeit one which has a main core and sub-cores. By the way you described it "The GPU is working on rendering while the CPU is doing something else", I thought you were as well. Regardless, All I really meant by it was that it isn't always the GPUs task to do every graphics related task. Also, as the AC who also replied to this said:
...modern games do a lot of vertex processing, and sometimes pixel post-processing too, is done on the SPUs
That's the kind of thing I meant (although I wan't aware those specifc things). Of course that will not be effected by AI calculations if distributed properly, but it may have some ramifications.
That actually depends on the game. The PS3 doesn't have a traditional CPU, and most of the really nice looking PS3 games use various parts of the cell for graphics (be it texture processing, or physics, or whatever). The cell isn't used for actual rendering, but it does affect many games graphics.
That said, some of those functions will be irrelevent, as the calculations will apply to both frames (or both views of the same frame if you want to look at it like that). Physics for example is, if I'm understanding it correctly, is related to object position per frame (and effects like motion blur) so would apply largely, if not completely, to both frames. Texture processing on the other hand may not, depending on the game. Your point certainly holds up for AI, in the same way as physics, but you can't say for every game that the CPU has no effect.
I would say the only real way to send them the message is to litterally send them a message. Don't buy the game, and tell them that you didn't because of the DRM. That way, they can't say "look, that person didn't buy it - he must have pirated it" and they can't say "people aren't buying it - we didn't market it enough" - it's the only way the loss of a sale can have any meaningful impact and can't be attributed to something else.
Couldn't tell ya, as I don't know the details of that, but from a quick google it seems that they can't face no repurcussions - they were ordered to pay the family several million dollars (~$10mil I think). Don't think that kind of thing would come under freedom of speech anyway, but rather right to protest (and when and where that right extends).
I think you're correct - at least thats my understanding of the US legal system. Honestly, I can see merits in both systems - in the US you have full freedom of speech while in Europe (generally speaking - it is a continent, not a country after all) you have the right to not be harrassed or discriminated against. I also think both tread a fine line between freedom and something very bad. The US version is on the good side of the line that crosses into segregation, while the European one stays on the good side of a 1984 situation (everything being controlled). Honestly I think the European system is better as-is, as it protects more than it supresses freedom.
As far as I know, in the UK at least, you can't sue for being insulted. You can if the comments made were racist, sexist, homophobic etc, but not simply insulting. You could possibly have them charged with verbal assault though. Also, as has already been mentioned, slander and offensivness do cross over from time to time, but are separate.
Well sorry if I came off as "I am right - you suck at jokes". I was in kinda a bad mood yesterday, so it probably came through in my posts. I think I need to get more sleep. Anyway, I still don't think it was funny - replacing words with silly alternatives just doesn't resonate with me (seems on the same level as "your mum" jokes) and I'm not a fan of the "I fixed that for you" meme, but I was a little harsh and aggressive I must admit. I honestly wasn't sure at the time if you were serious or not though...probably lack of sleep again there.
Well, technically it does have firmware, it's just not updatable. Firmware is just integrated, usually small, system software.
where did you get "submersible ship"?
...(from wikipedia)
I think I was fairly clear.
Subs aren't ships, they are boats
Apart from the fact that that is how the US Navy designates them, how are you defining ship and boat? As far as I'm aware the only distinction that you can make with any certainty is that ships are bigger than boats. By that definition, I would personally say that military subs classify as ships (I think they're big enough).
Also, see Q-Hack!s reply.
Strategic Submersible Booming Nuker
I even called it a Boomer, sheesh.
No you didn't - you fail again sir.
Seriously though, it was just really unfunny.
No you didn't. The SS denotes a "submersible ship", the B denotes "ballistic missile," and the N denotes "nuclear powered." (from wikipedia)
If that was supposed to be a joke, then you failed, because it wasn't funny. If it was serious, you failed for being wrong. Either way, FAIL