Editors: you guys seriously need to spell-check. You have drifted into the area where spelling mistakes are more than just inconvenient -- at this print, they actually obligate the moaning, and hunt my ability to pulse the seances.
How about some more factual information? NPR has done severalstories on this kind of treatment, and how it is (and isn't) used. This is not "rats push the button to feel good". This treatment involves a very precise electrical impulse delivered to the malfunctioning area of the brain; it is to electro-shock therapy what a bonsai knife is to a lawnmower, so the side effects, while not well-characterized, are likely to be orders of magnitude less intrusive.
It's used in cases where the depression is not treatable with current drugs. These are people who are so seriously neurochemically depressed that suicide seems attractive for the relief it would offer. The best we could give them before was a hug and a doctor mumbling that they were "interesting," until eventually they gave up and killed themselves. Now we can offer them this, which has at least one major advantage over suicide.
...and assigning it the death-slot (Friday 8pm), and cutting the advertising for it. I don't think they ever really wanted Joss to have a hit on FOX. Someone made the deal, and someone else got put in charge of fulfilling FOX's obligations, is my theory.
They were pissed that it cost so much to make, while "reality" was dirt-cheap and selling like hotcakes, so they torpedoed it. I hope the who cancelled the TV series all get invitations to the L.A. premiere. And then I hope that ABC picks up Firefly, and those same execs have to watch Firefly's second season kick the out of Fox's lineup.
It seems like it would be trivial to scan a database for recurring addresses -- sure, there might be four people in a two-bedroom apartment collecting unemployment. But fifty? A hundred? Send an investigator out to talk to anyone living at an address with more than (e.g.) six registered names. If nothing else, he can interview all six of the people and see if there's a systemic problem keeping them from getting work in an area.
Two things bother me about the article, however:
1) The person calling our attention to this problem is a software vendor. He runs a payroll software firm, and probably has some financial interest in fraud-detection software. If nothing else, his byline contains an advertisement for his company.
2) He doesn't really present any evidence for the problem other than hearsay from an official in Washington State. Neither of them presents any real numbers.
I think it's wise to prevent this problem, and shore up any weakness to this exploit that may exist, but it's also important to be sure that a problem exists before demanding that the state take action.
Put me in your camp -- I bought an engagement ring from a jeweler and have asked several friends of mine to at least stop by and browse because I was so happy with their service and flexibility. I went back to get some items engraved for my groomsmen, and even though they don't normally send items bought elsewhere for engraving, they sent my gifts out, got them engraved, and when I came to pick them up, was told that there wouldn't be a charge.
There's a reason that this is an old practice: it works. Let some schmoe off the street pay retail if he doesn't want to shop around. I told them up front what I'd seen elsewhere, and they decided they wanted my business enough to offer me a nicer ring at a lower price (and yes, "nicer" is my opinion -- but it was also my money).
I enjoy investing a little time to find low prices; others choose not to invest their time in price-hunting and pay a premium for their convenience.
The closest things we have to an English council are the Chicago and Oxford manuals of style, and on your points about both "data" and "none... was", they each rule against your initial impression. Chicago is more lax, but still insists that the word data is plural, and that the word none is an indefinite pronoun which is most correctly singular.
The debate you're trying to frame -- "should the rules of grammar follow usage or vice versa" -- is the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammar, and is fought by first-year English students in every college in America (and probably the UK as well). Descriptive grammar seeks to describe how language is used commonly, and must evolve; prescriptive seeks to codify how language ought to be used, and tends to hold its ground against the incursions of slang forms.
A quick summary of how the fight usually goes:
Prescriptive Grammarian: Abcde. Descriptive Grammarian: You mean 'ABC' don't you? PG: No; it turns out that the Latin form of "de" is more correct here. DG: But nobody says it that way. PG: Everybody else being wrong does not affect whether I'm right. DG: With so many different things that can sound right, is there really any right or wrong? PG: If there is only one correct way to say it, then it was the way I said it initiall, and so I was right. If there are several ways to say it that vary with usage, then consider my last statement a bit of "Prescriptive Grammarian" slang... and behold, I'm still right. DG: You're a jerk and a pedant. PG: Yes, but I'm still right. Neener neener neener.
The purpose of judges in English Law is to rule on the constitutionality of laws and to track and reconcile the hundreds of thousands of precedents. In France's code civile the judges can and do make up new law when it appears to them that a law is inadequate or overbearing.
It's not "vague" at all. The law amends Title 18 USC, Chapter 47, Section 1030. A "protected computer" refers to the effectivity of the law (your computer is "protected" by law) not by any particular user action.
A computer is "protected" if it is used for interstate or international commerce or communication. If you don't live in Michigan and you post on Slashdot, that's you.
Come on, read TFA, and then read the law. A "protected computer" is any computer used for interstate commerce or communication as defined in Title 18 USC, Ch. 47, section 1030.
No, "protected" refers to the bill/law, not to any act on the user's part. There are lots of comments on this article that include the text, but you can find it at USC Title 18, Ch. 47, Section 1030 (definition of a "protected computer").
No, as usual, Joe Slashdot has utterly failed to do any research. From U.S. Code Title 18, Chapter 47, Section 1030, which this bill amends:
(2) the term ``protected computer'' means a computer-- (A) exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the United States Government, or, in the case of a computer not exclusively for such use, used by or for a financial institution or the United States Government and the conduct constituting the offense affects that use by or for the financial institution or the Government; or
(B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States;
So this bill applies to any computer in the United States which communicates with any computer not in the same state (reserving that power for the legislatures of the states). It even covers your computer, as long as your comments here can be broadly interpreted as "communicating". Yeah, I know -- it's a stretch.
"Hons" (residents of Baltimore) make the distinction between "Baltimore City" and "Baltimore County" in their writing. Hearing just one can be confusing unless you know the local geography, and realize that just the word "Baltimore" refers to a large number of towns (like Towson) that are part of Baltimore but are actually in "the county". This map shows the difference.
Okay, how about this: many of the Times' authors and all of the editors live and work in New York City and its immediate metropolitan sprawl. Their social networks are also made up largely of New Yorkers. These are highly-educated wealthy people in New York who frequently only hear the liberal side of a given argument and (rightly) dismiss Fox News as horribly biased. By and large they do not socialize with southerners, midwesterners, members of the military, farmers, anyone from a small town, or evangelical Christians.
Recognizing, therefore, that this is a broad generalization, I think it's still quite fair to characterize the New York Times as "liberal" and "out of touch with roughly half of Americans' lives."
I've got one more: Kenneth Turan, the L.A. Times and NPR movie critic. He's right more often than he's wrong, and he and Ebert agree on this one. The link is to my LJ, where you can also see his reviews of the first two. Enjoy.
The people at the Times need to realize that $50/year is an amazingly unrealistic sum of money. You can subscribe to Playboy for $16.00/year, and you get good interviews, good articles, classy soft porn, some really excellent short fiction, and all the liberal opinions you could ever want.
So here's a question about the price: am I going to be paying $50/year so that the op-ed writers can afford to live in New York City? Or worse yet, so that they can afford to commute from Connecticut? I've always gotten the sense that NYC was its own little world, where the local population density has amplified demand and created a surreal amount of inflation. In Washington D.C. and Los Angeles, mocking NYC's bizarreness is a little hypocritical -- but I live in DC, and agree with my LA friends: this is a dumb move, and will serve to make the electronic op-ed section irrelevant.
SEN ELEPHANT: Read the text of the bill? All of your anarchist concerns aside, sometimes it is simply not necessary. There is nothing that hasn't already been done to drivers' licenses that can make the state into "Big Brother", but much to improve security!
If this law were designed to add burdensome restrictions, it would not be a rider on a military spending bill -- the liberals in Congress would be trumpeting it to the heavens and beyond!
At worst, this bill maintains current rights, and at best, it secures further rights for our citizens. There can be no possible detriment from any of the broad concepts proposed; this bill should be ratified on general principle alone.
I don't need to read the text to see how, exactly , it preserves our rights; enough of the facts have been reported in various places for me to know that it is RIGHT that you join me in voting Yea.
and cuss him out for not reading it, you might want to read the text of it yourself. You know, just maybe. Democracy requires an informed populace to work, and if you believe the partisan propaganda in the headline of a Slashdot story, how are you any better than a Republican senator who buys the partisan propaganda of the bill's author?
...is that the current equipment out there is probably not actually delivering all of the wattage that the specification calls for. For example, a cable modem draws about 20 watts from the wall; even if it's delivering all of that to computers on the network with no losses... then it can only support one of these machines without drawing power from somewhere else.
It's mostly just that I have been giving Slashdot crap about their idiotic grammar mistakes for a long time now, and it's a tough habit to break. That (-1, Offtopic) dinged my karma up a little. ARGH.
Yeah, well, if you bothered to read it, you'd see that I had written a carefully-altered version of the post -- altered, in fact, for HUMOR purposes! (Laugh; it's funny!) But you didn't bother.
Should I stick to humor that you don't have to read? No, for that way lies madness and goatse.
Slashdot Mirror
Editors: you guys seriously need to spell-check. You have drifted into the area where spelling mistakes are more than just inconvenient -- at this print, they actually obligate the moaning, and hunt my ability to pulse the seances.
How about some more factual information? NPR has done several stories on this kind of treatment, and how it is (and isn't) used. This is not "rats push the button to feel good". This treatment involves a very precise electrical impulse delivered to the malfunctioning area of the brain; it is to electro-shock therapy what a bonsai knife is to a lawnmower, so the side effects, while not well-characterized, are likely to be orders of magnitude less intrusive.
It's used in cases where the depression is not treatable with current drugs. These are people who are so seriously neurochemically depressed that suicide seems attractive for the relief it would offer. The best we could give them before was a hug and a doctor mumbling that they were "interesting," until eventually they gave up and killed themselves. Now we can offer them this, which has at least one major advantage over suicide.
...and assigning it the death-slot (Friday 8pm), and cutting the advertising for it. I don't think they ever really wanted Joss to have a hit on FOX. Someone made the deal, and someone else got put in charge of fulfilling FOX's obligations, is my theory.
They were pissed that it cost so much to make, while "reality" was dirt-cheap and selling like hotcakes, so they torpedoed it. I hope the who cancelled the TV series all get invitations to the L.A. premiere. And then I hope that ABC picks up Firefly, and those same execs have to watch Firefly's second season kick the out of Fox's lineup.
It seems like it would be trivial to scan a database for recurring addresses -- sure, there might be four people in a two-bedroom apartment collecting unemployment. But fifty? A hundred? Send an investigator out to talk to anyone living at an address with more than (e.g.) six registered names. If nothing else, he can interview all six of the people and see if there's a systemic problem keeping them from getting work in an area.
Two things bother me about the article, however:
1) The person calling our attention to this problem is a software vendor. He runs a payroll software firm, and probably has some financial interest in fraud-detection software. If nothing else, his byline contains an advertisement for his company.
2) He doesn't really present any evidence for the problem other than hearsay from an official in Washington State. Neither of them presents any real numbers.
I think it's wise to prevent this problem, and shore up any weakness to this exploit that may exist, but it's also important to be sure that a problem exists before demanding that the state take action.
It goes like this, maaaaan: "puff, puff, give." You're hogging the bowl, and totally harshing the rotation. Pass that sh*t over here, maaaaan.
I'm pretty sure you meant for this one to be posted after the Spam Zombies in Europe post.
Put me in your camp -- I bought an engagement ring from a jeweler and have asked several friends of mine to at least stop by and browse because I was so happy with their service and flexibility. I went back to get some items engraved for my groomsmen, and even though they don't normally send items bought elsewhere for engraving, they sent my gifts out, got them engraved, and when I came to pick them up, was told that there wouldn't be a charge.
There's a reason that this is an old practice: it works. Let some schmoe off the street pay retail if he doesn't want to shop around. I told them up front what I'd seen elsewhere, and they decided they wanted my business enough to offer me a nicer ring at a lower price (and yes, "nicer" is my opinion -- but it was also my money).
I enjoy investing a little time to find low prices; others choose not to invest their time in price-hunting and pay a premium for their convenience.
The debate you're trying to frame -- "should the rules of grammar follow usage or vice versa" -- is the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammar, and is fought by first-year English students in every college in America (and probably the UK as well). Descriptive grammar seeks to describe how language is used commonly, and must evolve; prescriptive seeks to codify how language ought to be used, and tends to hold its ground against the incursions of slang forms.
A quick summary of how the fight usually goes:
The purpose of judges in English Law is to rule on the constitutionality of laws and to track and reconcile the hundreds of thousands of precedents. In France's code civile the judges can and do make up new law when it appears to them that a law is inadequate or overbearing.
It's not "vague" at all. The law amends Title 18 USC, Chapter 47, Section 1030. A "protected computer" refers to the effectivity of the law (your computer is "protected" by law) not by any particular user action.
A computer is "protected" if it is used for interstate or international commerce or communication. If you don't live in Michigan and you post on Slashdot, that's you.
No no no!
Come on, read TFA, and then read the law. A "protected computer" is any computer used for interstate commerce or communication as defined in Title 18 USC, Ch. 47, section 1030.
No, "protected" refers to the bill/law, not to any act on the user's part. There are lots of comments on this article that include the text, but you can find it at USC Title 18, Ch. 47, Section 1030 (definition of a "protected computer").
So this bill applies to any computer in the United States which communicates with any computer not in the same state (reserving that power for the legislatures of the states). It even covers your computer, as long as your comments here can be broadly interpreted as "communicating". Yeah, I know -- it's a stretch.
"Hons" (residents of Baltimore) make the distinction between "Baltimore City" and "Baltimore County" in their writing. Hearing just one can be confusing unless you know the local geography, and realize that just the word "Baltimore" refers to a large number of towns (like Towson) that are part of Baltimore but are actually in "the county". This map shows the difference.
Okay, how about this: many of the Times' authors and all of the editors live and work in New York City and its immediate metropolitan sprawl. Their social networks are also made up largely of New Yorkers. These are highly-educated wealthy people in New York who frequently only hear the liberal side of a given argument and (rightly) dismiss Fox News as horribly biased. By and large they do not socialize with southerners, midwesterners, members of the military, farmers, anyone from a small town, or evangelical Christians.
Recognizing, therefore, that this is a broad generalization, I think it's still quite fair to characterize the New York Times as "liberal" and "out of touch with roughly half of Americans' lives."
I've got one more: Kenneth Turan, the L.A. Times and NPR movie critic. He's right more often than he's wrong, and he and Ebert agree on this one. The link is to my LJ, where you can also see his reviews of the first two. Enjoy.
The people at the Times need to realize that $50/year is an amazingly unrealistic sum of money. You can subscribe to Playboy for $16.00/year, and you get good interviews, good articles, classy soft porn, some really excellent short fiction, and all the liberal opinions you could ever want.
So here's a question about the price: am I going to be paying $50/year so that the op-ed writers can afford to live in New York City? Or worse yet, so that they can afford to commute from Connecticut? I've always gotten the sense that NYC was its own little world, where the local population density has amplified demand and created a surreal amount of inflation. In Washington D.C. and Los Angeles, mocking NYC's bizarreness is a little hypocritical -- but I live in DC, and agree with my LA friends: this is a dumb move, and will serve to make the electronic op-ed section irrelevant.
Dude, I think your bot is broken.
MINUTES FROM THE FLOOR OF THE SENATE
SEN ELEPHANT: Read the text of the bill? All of your anarchist concerns aside, sometimes it is simply not necessary. There is nothing that hasn't already been done to drivers' licenses that can make the state into "Big Brother", but much to improve security!
If this law were designed to add burdensome restrictions, it would not be a rider on a military spending bill -- the liberals in Congress would be trumpeting it to the heavens and beyond!
At worst, this bill maintains current rights, and at best, it secures further rights for our citizens. There can be no possible detriment from any of the broad concepts proposed; this bill should be ratified on general principle alone.
I don't need to read the text to see how, exactly , it preserves our rights; enough of the facts have been reported in various places for me to know that it is RIGHT that you join me in voting Yea.
and cuss him out for not reading it, you might want to read the text of it yourself. You know, just maybe. Democracy requires an informed populace to work, and if you believe the partisan propaganda in the headline of a Slashdot story, how are you any better than a Republican senator who buys the partisan propaganda of the bill's author?
...now how am I supposed to fry my eggs?
...is that the current equipment out there is probably not actually delivering all of the wattage that the specification calls for. For example, a cable modem draws about 20 watts from the wall; even if it's delivering all of that to computers on the network with no losses... then it can only support one of these machines without drawing power from somewhere else.
It's mostly just that I have been giving Slashdot crap about their idiotic grammar mistakes for a long time now, and it's a tough habit to break. That (-1, Offtopic) dinged my karma up a little. ARGH.
Yeah, well, if you bothered to read it, you'd see that I had written a carefully-altered version of the post -- altered, in fact, for HUMOR purposes! (Laugh; it's funny!) But you didn't bother.
Should I stick to humor that you don't have to read? No, for that way lies madness and goatse.
They also misspelled (and didn't capitalize, but that's a religious debate) "Joule".
But yes, this is what Slashdot needs more of.