Or rather, I did once, when I first started signing things. My signature has been about the same since about 1994 -- a vaguely readable mash of letters that, several generations of signatures earlier, was my name in cursive. (The only reason I can still write a cursive capital F is because my last name starts with one.)
Which raises the question: how will the cursive-deprived kids of tomorrow sign their names? Printing? An arbitrary but consistent scribble? L33t-5p33k? Or will we have computerized authentication for everything by that time?
That's exactly what I'm missing here... How did Babelfish managed to translate it "Their"????
In English, we call everyone "you". We used to call them "thou" and "you" depending on whether there was one or more people being addressed.
Then, later, we started to use "you" as a politee address for individuals, because respected people were "more" than others. Eventually "you" took over and completely supplanted "thou".
In French, it's the same, except that "you" didn't take over: they still have the singular tu, but they use vous for plurals and as a mark of respect.
In Italian, it's even weirder: they still use tu informally, and voi to a group, but to say "you" politely, you use the word for "her". This is because, way back, they used to address people politely like "How is your lordship?" or "What does Your Excellency wish?". Eventually it got annoying to say "Your Lordship" all the time, so they started saying just "It" instead. But "excellency" and "lordship" are feminine in Italian, so "it" was actually "she".
I believe its the same reason in German. Originally the polite form of "you" (sie) stood for some title one used to refer politely to people, just like Herr originally meant "Lord".
Well, the U.S. is pussyfooting around North Korea. You can take this as evidence that the U.S. believes they have nuclear weapons, or that the U.S. doesn't care about them because they don't have oil, or both, depending on your political persuasion.
Not to be confused with Computron, the giant robot formed when the Technobots merged together. The Technobots, if you recall, were created by Grimlock in Season Four when he was suddenly made into a super-genius for an episode.
(Ah, the joys of reliving precious childhood obsessions through Kazaa downloads.)
Lets say I wanted to write a client to transfer files via the internet. I could just write my own from scratch, looking at low-level socket communication. Oh! Wait a minute, I ran into a standard, the TCP/IP stack. Nah, I'll use UDP. D'oh! Ran into another standard.
Despite the slashdot headline, his point was not that standards themselves stifle innovation, but that pre-emptively creating standards before technology has a chance to mature stifles innovation.
In the case of TCP/IP and UDP, these became de facto standards not because some panel of experts agreed on them, but because they earned their place by becoming more popular than rival standards (maybe IPX/SPX, etc.).
They were only accepted as de jure standards long after they had were de facto standards.
Just remember, please, that blaming every American for what its government does is like blaming every German for what Hitler did.
I suspect most Europeans, at least, watch enough American media to know of quite a number of different Americans by reputation, at least. This is pretty good at keeping one from thinking of Americans as a monolithic group.
Still, when one talks about Microsoft, a company that has aided, benefited from and is closely connected with the current American government, than cancelling a contract thorough disgruntlement with American government decisions is a bit more well-founded.
Well, I'm quite proud to be an (adopted) Canadian. I see this as just another way for us to poke the Nazi Americans...what with SARs, mad cow, and our threat to decriminalize pot...why shouldn't we just push the envelope a little more?;-)
We also maintain a threatening lead in Zamboni technology. [This borrowed from Canadian Bacon].
I'm not looking to troll here - seriously, that's an honest statement - but just what is it about Buffy that has some of you ga-ga over it? Schoolboy fantasies? Demonic possession? Please elaborate.
Intelligent and witty script-writing. Original ideas. Well-balanced interplay between comedy and actual drama. Camp that recognizes itself as camp and evokes a laugh still.
A bit part of Buffy is the dual-life thing: ditzy highschool chick versus demonic arse-kicker. Every superhero has to face this, but Buffy carries it off with a sense of balance and self-referential humour that I've not seen done before. And playing with and poking at the nature of reality is a favourite pastime of all us geeks: witness the appeal of The Matrix, as only the most hyped among many other possible examples.
As for the Sarah Michelle Gellar theory, I think that I'd probably go for Willow before Buffy.
When I started, back in the day, one could get free food by swiping a WATCARD at a vending machine and quickly unplugging the machine from behind. (Never did this myself, but I did witness it being done.)
Of course this was best done late at night, with a friend, and with several others to man the halls leading to the vending machine in question to alert you if security was on its way.
After awhile, the admin got wise and banned WATCARD vending machine purchases after 5 p.m. Later, after I moved out of res, I heard they fixed it so this theft was no longer possible.
The great thing about neurotic computers is that they can diagnose themselves. Picture a session starting with:
"Hello TLX-1258-C, my name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you. Say whatever is in your mind freely, our conversation will be kept in strict confidence. Memory contents will be wiped off after you leave. So, tell me about your problems."
And, in a sense, we did bring it on ourselves, but we've already done so. The US support for Israel is at the root of most of the Islamic hatred toward us. Had the US not historically supported Israel, in our place I expect France and Germany would have simply let Israel's neighbors invade and kill all the Jews. That would have been a Final Solution to the whole problem.
The Europeans are no saints. But to say they would do nothing in such a case is totally unwarranted. Keep in mind that when you argue with "hypothetical genocide", you're just going to be preaching to the converted.
Anyway, you argue that war on Iraq is necessary, whether it's just or not, in order to clean up the reprecussions of past actions (support of Israel).
What assurances do you have that a war will clean up these reprecussions?
Damn, you're right. I did remember having heard about his rating dropping recently, and didn't look carefully enough at the result of my Google search. Thanks.
Wow, I knew the Americans have been annoyed at the French and Germans lately, but man: a few sharp words from Jacques Chirac are no excuse for gas clouds and ion radiation!
The loudest group isn't always the majority. Usually it's the minority. Often times, the louder the group is, the smaller it is. Happy people don't need to complain about anything.
So the anti-Chavez protesters in Venezuela are a minority then, eh?:)
Actually the GPL is more likely to hold in court because of the way it works: it grants you extra rights, unlike a Microsoft(TM) license, which only takes away your rights.
Legally, you have no automatic rights to use or redistribute anything. This is how copyright works. So Microsoft is not "taking away your rights", since you never had them in the first place.
Both the MS EULA and the GPL operate on top of copyright. The only sustantial difference is that under the GPL, you get the code and the right to redistribution, which are indeed "extra rights".
If you believe that, morally, software should be distributed something like how GPL'ed software is distributed, then you can indeed say that Microsoft takes away your rights. This is the sense in which Stallman uses the term. But you should make the legal/moral distinction clear in your arguments.
In cloning, the genes come from the same donor so it is not possible for the clone to have an active gene while the original have not.
No, it's entirely possible for that to be the case. The active gene is determined on a cell-to-cell basis, not throughout the body. The inactive X chromosome becomes what is known as a Barr body.
Slashdot Mirror
...is signing my own name.
Or rather, I did once, when I first started signing things. My signature has been about the same since about 1994 -- a vaguely readable mash of letters that, several generations of signatures earlier, was my name in cursive. (The only reason I can still write a cursive capital F is because my last name starts with one.)
Which raises the question: how will the cursive-deprived kids of tomorrow sign their names? Printing? An arbitrary but consistent scribble? L33t-5p33k? Or will we have computerized authentication for everything by that time?
Actually, I read The Silmarillion before the Lord of the Rings, and got absolutely hooked.
I had no interest in reading the Lord of Rings, or even in fantasy literature beyond a bunch of David Eddings books, but the Silmarillion (from the very beginning story, the Ainulindalé) had a scale I've never seen before or since in fantasy literature.
It also introduced me to the amazing world of philology. Seriously, it was one of the top five books I've ever read.
That's exactly what I'm missing here... How did Babelfish managed to translate it "Their"????
In English, we call everyone "you". We used to call them "thou" and "you" depending on whether there was one or more people being addressed.
Then, later, we started to use "you" as a politee address for individuals, because respected people were "more" than others. Eventually "you" took over and completely supplanted "thou".
In French, it's the same, except that "you" didn't take over: they still have the singular tu, but they use vous for plurals and as a mark of respect.
In Italian, it's even weirder: they still use tu informally, and voi to a group, but to say "you" politely, you use the word for "her". This is because, way back, they used to address people politely like "How is your lordship?" or "What does Your Excellency wish?". Eventually it got annoying to say "Your Lordship" all the time, so they started saying just "It" instead. But "excellency" and "lordship" are feminine in Italian, so "it" was actually "she".
I believe its the same reason in German. Originally the polite form of "you" (sie) stood for some title one used to refer politely to people, just like Herr originally meant "Lord".
I take it you arn't a Poker player....
Well, the U.S. is pussyfooting around North Korea. You can take this as evidence that the U.S. believes they have nuclear weapons, or that the U.S. doesn't care about them because they don't have oil, or both, depending on your political persuasion.
computon: not to be confused with Computron the Transformer, formed when the Technobots merged together.
Not to be confused with Computron, the giant robot formed when the Technobots merged together. The Technobots, if you recall, were created by Grimlock in Season Four when he was suddenly made into a super-genius for an episode.
(Ah, the joys of reliving precious childhood obsessions through Kazaa downloads.)
Lets say I wanted to write a client to transfer files via the internet. I could just write my own from scratch, looking at low-level socket communication. Oh! Wait a minute, I ran into a standard, the TCP/IP stack. Nah, I'll use UDP. D'oh! Ran into another standard.
Despite the slashdot headline, his point was not that standards themselves stifle innovation, but that pre-emptively creating standards before technology has a chance to mature stifles innovation.
In the case of TCP/IP and UDP, these became de facto standards not because some panel of experts agreed on them, but because they earned their place by becoming more popular than rival standards (maybe IPX/SPX, etc.).
They were only accepted as de jure standards long after they had were de facto standards.
Just remember, please, that blaming every American for what its government does is like blaming every German for what Hitler did.
I suspect most Europeans, at least, watch enough American media to know of quite a number of different Americans by reputation, at least. This is pretty good at keeping one from thinking of Americans as a monolithic group.
Still, when one talks about Microsoft, a company that has aided, benefited from and is closely connected with the current American government, than cancelling a contract thorough disgruntlement with American government decisions is a bit more well-founded.
This actually gives me another reason to support the war in Iraq - it's pissing off foreign Microsoft customers!
:)
There is that "the rest of the world hates you" thing, but I can deal with that.
It's a lot easier with a global superpower at your back, eh?
Well, I'm quite proud to be an (adopted) Canadian. I see this as just another way for us to poke the Nazi Americans...what with SARs, mad cow, and our threat to decriminalize pot...why shouldn't we just push the envelope a little more? ;-)
We also maintain a threatening lead in Zamboni technology. [This borrowed from Canadian Bacon].
I'm not looking to troll here - seriously, that's an honest statement - but just what is it about Buffy that has some of you ga-ga over it? Schoolboy fantasies? Demonic possession? Please elaborate.
Intelligent and witty script-writing. Original ideas. Well-balanced interplay between comedy and actual drama. Camp that recognizes itself as camp and evokes a laugh still.
A bit part of Buffy is the dual-life thing: ditzy highschool chick versus demonic arse-kicker. Every superhero has to face this, but Buffy carries it off with a sense of balance and self-referential humour that I've not seen done before. And playing with and poking at the nature of reality is a favourite pastime of all us geeks: witness the appeal of The Matrix, as only the most hyped among many other possible examples.
As for the Sarah Michelle Gellar theory, I think that I'd probably go for Willow before Buffy.
You'd find the Buffy audience to be centered around older females and young and middle-aged men.
I knew a lot of girls in university who watched Buffy. In fact, my university (Waterloo) even had a Buffy Watchers Club.
Still, I think your list is fairly complete with the addition of young women (i.e. > 16 but 30).
At Waterloo, our WATCARDS use the OneCard system.
When I started, back in the day, one could get free food by swiping a WATCARD at a vending machine and quickly unplugging the machine from behind. (Never did this myself, but I did witness it being done.)
Of course this was best done late at night, with a friend, and with several others to man the halls leading to the vending machine in question to alert you if security was on its way.
After awhile, the admin got wise and banned WATCARD vending machine purchases after 5 p.m. Later, after I moved out of res, I heard they fixed it so this theft was no longer possible.
The great thing about neurotic computers is that they can diagnose themselves. Picture a session starting with:
"Hello TLX-1258-C, my name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you. Say whatever is in your mind freely, our conversation will be kept in strict confidence. Memory contents will be wiped off after you leave. So, tell me about your problems."
And, in a sense, we did bring it on ourselves, but we've already done so. The US support for Israel is at the root of most of the Islamic hatred toward us. Had the US not historically supported Israel, in our place I expect France and Germany would have simply let Israel's neighbors invade and kill all the Jews. That would have been a Final Solution to the whole problem.
The Europeans are no saints. But to say they would do nothing in such a case is totally unwarranted. Keep in mind that when you argue with "hypothetical genocide", you're just going to be preaching to the converted.
Anyway, you argue that war on Iraq is necessary, whether it's just or not, in order to clean up the reprecussions of past actions (support of Israel).
What assurances do you have that a war will clean up these reprecussions?
The four-colour theorem was a graph-theoretic problem with a finite number of cases. This is not.
Sure you might find a counterexample instead of a proof. But all the OP said was that you wouldn't find a proof.
Damn, you're right. I did remember having heard about his rating dropping recently, and didn't look carefully enough at the result of my Google search. Thanks.
Wow, I knew the Americans have been annoyed at the French and Germans lately, but man: a few sharp words from Jacques Chirac are no excuse for gas clouds and ion radiation!
Actually, Bush's rating is at 53% as of yesterday, according to CNN/USA Today/Gallup.
:)
The loudest group isn't always the majority. Usually it's the minority. Often times, the louder the group is, the smaller it is. Happy people don't need to complain about anything.
So the anti-Chavez protesters in Venezuela are a minority then, eh?
Right, so a McLaurent series is like a Taylor series, expanded about x=0, with exponents ranging from -infinity..+infinity.
:)
I'm amused that you actually got an "informative" mod point for this.
We did, in no particular order: differential equations, groups, rings, RSA encryption, McLaurent series, and matrix manipulation.
Er, you mean either "Maclaurin" series or "Laurent" series.
A Maclaurin series is the Taylor expansion of a function about 0.
A Laurent series is like a Taylor series, but with the range of exponents going from -infinity to infinity instead of 0 to infinity.
(Maple is capable of doing both of these.)
The fact that this was modded down to troll is disturbing. There are some very legitimate reasons to be annoyed with the Office of Homeland Security.
And the OP is not the first to make comparisons with Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Actually the GPL is more likely to hold in court because of the way it works: it grants you extra rights, unlike a Microsoft(TM) license, which only takes away your rights.
Legally, you have no automatic rights to use or redistribute anything. This is how copyright works. So Microsoft is not "taking away your rights", since you never had them in the first place.
Both the MS EULA and the GPL operate on top of copyright. The only sustantial difference is that under the GPL, you get the code and the right to redistribution, which are indeed "extra rights".
If you believe that, morally, software should be distributed something like how GPL'ed software is distributed, then you can indeed say that Microsoft takes away your rights. This is the sense in which Stallman uses the term. But you should make the legal/moral distinction clear in your arguments.
4) A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Err, wasn't that actually the Zeroth Law?
In cloning, the genes come from the same donor so it is not possible for the clone to have an active gene while the original have not.
No, it's entirely possible for that to be the case. The active gene is determined on a cell-to-cell basis, not throughout the body. The inactive X chromosome becomes what is known as a Barr body.