Re: Address to spelling mistakes...
on
20 Years of Virii
·
· Score: 1
> It may be true that the lead articles in/. should be held to a higher standard than replies
Cripes, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard than the lead articles!
Re: Lets get this out of the way
on
20 Years of Virii
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> "Agenda", on the hand, is singular. "Agendae" is the plural. (1st declension feminine)
What you say is true of 'propaganda' [adopted from "faith (fem. sing.) to-be-propagated"], but not, according to my dictionary, for 'agenda' [adopted from "things (neut.pl.) to-be-done"].
Re: Lets get this out of the way
on
20 Years of Virii
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> English isn't Latin
And English is full of "wrong" Latin usages. People get pedantic insisting that 'data' be used as a plural in English, but the same people never use 'agenda' as a plural.
It's all arbitrary, use WTF you want. The only costs are the risk of being misunderstood and the risk of having supercilious types raise their eyebrows.
> As the submitter of the story, I feel the same way, although I do get annoyed when a certain friend of mine uses the word 'irregardless'.
Just be glad he doesn't use 'disregardless'.
> I would be willing to bet that most people that read the subject line of the story will understand exactly what it means...and someday, when they put 'virii' in a dictionary somewhere, I hope they'll put my name beside it...yeh!!!
Supposedly the reason the American Heritage dictionary was created was that certain personality types were offended with Webster's policy of treating dictionaries as descriptive rather than prescriptive, and adding new word-forms as they came into vogue.
Assuredly, if enough people adopt 'virii' it will eventually show up in dictionaries, and then all the people reviling it will suddenly have to admit that it's OK... The OED adds new words on a regular basis; we should all start using 'virii' just to see if we can get our word in.
Notice in passing that every word we speak was made up by somebody somewhere along the way. Those who don't like neologisms can choose to deal with it or not deal with it, but it isn't going to make much difference over the long run.
> So, what is the nominative plural of virus? I agree it's not virii, but we do need and answer so that the editors and others know what to do. I believe 'viruses' is OK in English, but what is the Latin plural?
There isn't any recorded Latin plural for it. It is thought to be a non-count noun like "furniture". (FWIW, we also only have a couple of recorded uses other than in the nom. or acc.)
It can be translated as "pestilence", which usually isn't pluralized in English either (though you can set up awkward usages that would be pluralized).
> Dude, I would very much think so. At least here (in Deutschland), if you buy e.g. stolen goods of someone, its your bad (and the dealer's) and you are liable in that you have to give them back.
Bad analogy, IMO. More like, what if you bought a book, or a friend gave it to you, and some other author sued the author of that book for copyright infringement. Would that other author also be entitled to sue you, or even make you destroy your copy of the book?
> I'm a Christian, and I say bring it on! A Christian shouldn't have anything to fear! Any "body mark" that could be a *requirement* for global commerce just means that the Bible's predictions are right and the Christian can rejoice that the end is near. Yay!
How do you know this is the prophesized Mark of the Beast rather than just another technological change?
> Isn't our government supposed to behave near elections?
Yeah, behave the way the lobbyists want them to.
It's no accident that people are calling recent legislation the "No Lobbyist Left Behind" act. There's a big election at stake, and everyone wants the lobbyists behind them..
Perhaps this is a good time to plug Oliver Sachs' classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of essays about bizarre cognitive disorders such as Tourette's Syndrome. It is of interest here because the title story is about a man whose face-recognition "software" was broken - not just the ability to distinguish Peter from Paul, but the basic ability to recognize a face as a face. Bizarre and a bit scary, but a very good read, and very thought provoking.
> But if that tortilla is what it takes to strengthen your faith... "God works in mysterious ways," indeed.
A decade or two ago there was supposedly an image of Jesus in the stains on the floor of a service station restroom in Mexico, with resulting pilgrimages.
If I were a god, I'd have to draw the line at that one.
> > The first attempt to make it into a movie was a disaster, it was a disney style cartoon...
> Don't knock it. That cartoon wasn't stylized like a cheap, Korean-made, Saturday morning toy advertisement cartoon. I would have preferred live action, but special effects being what they were in the 1960s, I can see why they tried the animated approach. The "cartoon" still managed to incorporate more of the elements and the spirit of the books than Jackson could ever do with any amount of run-time. The difference is that Peter Jackson completed his adaptation, and for that I applaud him.
The problem I had with the cartoon - other than failure to deliver the complete story - is that it was patched together of apparently random stylistic changes. It looked like they farmed segments of the project out to independent teams and didn't enforce an overall plan for how it would be done. IIRC it ranged from "Disney style cartoon" to rotoscoped live action film.
Remember also that this was at the time when the cult film Wizards was popular, an innovative and impressive film at the time, and with a similar theme. The animated take on LoTR might have been a hit, if done better and completed.
> his masterpeace hollywoodized for the consumption of the illiterate masses.
If LoTR was produced by the usual Hollywood crowd...
Hobbit "Merry" would be a faggot with a penchant for saying things that made everyone else in the movie think he was "Gay", though the audience would know better.
The ringwraiths would be top-secret robotic soldiers with lasers on their heads, taken over by a "hacker" (Sauron).
The flight from the Shire to Rivendell would be a car chase.
The barrow wights would be drug dealers, angry because the car chase crashed through the warehouse right when their big deal was going down.
Strider would be a 6'1" Brazilian lesbian who wore a chainmail bikini and prefered kickboxing to broadswords. The camera would linger lovingly at the appropriate places, and she would give Arwen a hot kiss in the trailer.
When the Hobbits first met Strider at Bree, there would be a pole dancer in the background while they talked.
After the skirmish at weathertop, Elven paratroopers would drop in to rescue the heros just after they had driven off the ringwraiths and didn't need help anymore.
At the Ford of Isen, the flash flood would be caused because one of the Bad Guys' Henchmen set off the charge and blew the dam a few seconds too late. The cars washed down the river by the flood would go over a waterfall and explode in mid air.
There would be an enemy mole in the Fellowship, motivated by jealousy over somebody or another.
The tentacled thingy outside the Gates of Moria would drag the mole to his death. Papers found on his body afterward would tip the Fellowship off that he had been a mole.
The orcs in Moria would be more drug dealers, angry because the Fellowship interrupted another big deal. Or maybe terrorists planning an attack on the Shire, angry at being discovered before carrying out the plot. The Fellowship would kill about 900 in hand-to-hand combat before they had to flee.
Ms. Strider would wrestle the balrog while the others fled, losing her top duing the fight but having it CGBra'd back on to preserve the film's rating.
Lots of explosions in the Moria fight, even though everyone was fighting with knives and crowbars.
Everyone would get laid at the visit to Galadriel's haven. (Except for Merry, who would spend the evening putting off the advances of a Gay Elven Warrior who came out of the closet due to Merry's charms.) Frodo and Strider would rate a threesome with Galadriel herself.
Lembas would give the heros Amazing Powers, which would fade just when they needed it most.
Boromir would break up the Fellowship by making a pass at Merry, never previously having a queer urge in his life. Merry's dignity would be saved by a timely Orc raid.
> First franchise not to let fans down?... You wanna see great film making go rent a copy of "The Man Who Would Be King" or one of the other thousands of classic movies out there you don't even know about.
Great movie, but he was talking about franchises. When we see TMWWBK VII we can revisit this issue.
> Linguistical the 'a' does not denote a negative.
Sure it does. It's the Greek reflex of the Proto-Indo-European syllabic 'n', which appears in Latin as in and in English as un. The negative ('non', 'not', 'without') is precisely what it denotes:
a-the-ist "without-god(s)-person"
a-gnostic "without-knowledge"
a-bio-genesis "non-biological-origins"
a-historical "non-historical"
a-symmetric "not-symmetric"
a-mne-sia "without-memory-syndrome"
a-pha-sia "without-speech-syndrome"
a-pathy "without-suffering"
a-tomic "not-cuttable"
The raw meaning of 'atheism' is precisely the same as 'godlessness', though of course both have come to have different conventional meanings in modern English. (As per your peeve that I did not quote.) Such are the habits of language.
> Nice idea! But instead of using a "net", you could use a "fishing rod" with different types of "bait", depending on the type of application you want to catch.
And whenever you had problems you could call the geeky Master Baiters down in tech support for help.
> It really pisses me off when I have to open a Novell or Microsoft support incident (which cost $300 each) and they give me someone in India who I can't understand...
Most companies I call give me someone in the USA that I can't understand. It's nothing to do with IT; it's the crappy pay scale and the sociology of who gets the crappy-paying jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
> It may be true that the lead articles in
Cripes, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard than the lead articles!
> "Agenda", on the hand, is singular. "Agendae" is the plural. (1st declension feminine)
What you say is true of 'propaganda' [adopted from "faith (fem. sing.) to-be-propagated"], but not, according to my dictionary, for 'agenda' [adopted from "things (neut.pl.) to-be-done"].
> English isn't Latin
And English is full of "wrong" Latin usages. People get pedantic insisting that 'data' be used as a plural in English, but the same people never use 'agenda' as a plural.
It's all arbitrary, use WTF you want. The only costs are the risk of being misunderstood and the risk of having supercilious types raise their eyebrows.
> radii -> radius
> virii -> virius
> See? Works perfectly!
I -> us
Oops, it's backwards!
> As the submitter of the story, I feel the same way, although I do get annoyed when a certain friend of mine uses the word 'irregardless'.
Just be glad he doesn't use 'disregardless'.
> I would be willing to bet that most people that read the subject line of the story will understand exactly what it means...and someday, when they put 'virii' in a dictionary somewhere, I hope they'll put my name beside it...yeh!!!
Supposedly the reason the American Heritage dictionary was created was that certain personality types were offended with Webster's policy of treating dictionaries as descriptive rather than prescriptive, and adding new word-forms as they came into vogue.
Assuredly, if enough people adopt 'virii' it will eventually show up in dictionaries, and then all the people reviling it will suddenly have to admit that it's OK... The OED adds new words on a regular basis; we should all start using 'virii' just to see if we can get our word in.
Notice in passing that every word we speak was made up by somebody somewhere along the way. Those who don't like neologisms can choose to deal with it or not deal with it, but it isn't going to make much difference over the long run.
> So, what is the nominative plural of virus? I agree it's not virii, but we do need and answer so that the editors and others know what to do. I believe 'viruses' is OK in English, but what is the Latin plural?
There isn't any recorded Latin plural for it. It is thought to be a non-count noun like "furniture". (FWIW, we also only have a couple of recorded uses other than in the nom. or acc.)
It can be translated as "pestilence", which usually isn't pluralized in English either (though you can set up awkward usages that would be pluralized).
> Dude, I would very much think so. At least here (in Deutschland), if you buy e.g. stolen goods of someone, its your bad (and the dealer's) and you are liable in that you have to give them back.
Bad analogy, IMO. More like, what if you bought a book, or a friend gave it to you, and some other author sued the author of that book for copyright infringement. Would that other author also be entitled to sue you, or even make you destroy your copy of the book?
> I wish I could read the originals as they were written...
Better yet, read the previous 15 verses and see how poorly the current situation fits the prophecy.
> I'm a Christian, and I say bring it on! A Christian shouldn't have anything to fear! Any "body mark" that could be a *requirement* for global commerce just means that the Bible's predictions are right and the Christian can rejoice that the end is near. Yay!
How do you know this is the prophesized Mark of the Beast rather than just another technological change?
> Isn't our government supposed to behave near elections?
Yeah, behave the way the lobbyists want them to.
It's no accident that people are calling recent legislation the "No Lobbyist Left Behind" act. There's a big election at stake, and everyone wants the lobbyists behind them..
Perhaps this is a good time to plug Oliver Sachs' classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of essays about bizarre cognitive disorders such as Tourette's Syndrome. It is of interest here because the title story is about a man whose face-recognition "software" was broken - not just the ability to distinguish Peter from Paul, but the basic ability to recognize a face as a face. Bizarre and a bit scary, but a very good read, and very thought provoking.
> But if that tortilla is what it takes to strengthen your faith... "God works in mysterious ways," indeed.
A decade or two ago there was supposedly an image of Jesus in the stains on the floor of a service station restroom in Mexico, with resulting pilgrimages.
If I were a god, I'd have to draw the line at that one.
I wonder whether Mr. Hatch ever paused to consider that porn is a market reality as well...
> What encryption? RFID as it stands has no challenge-response, it's just a static barcode readable by radio interference.
Maybe they could encrypt it with ROT-666.
> Strange that the text actually says in the hand or forehead, not on.
Yeah, but it kinda blows it by assuming that poor people will be allowed to buy stuff.
> "from the they-like-it dept." indeed - next Slashdot will be telling us Gollum doesn't get the girl.
But at least he got the fish.
> > The first attempt to make it into a movie was a disaster, it was a disney style cartoon...
> Don't knock it. That cartoon wasn't stylized like a cheap, Korean-made, Saturday morning toy advertisement cartoon. I would have preferred live action, but special effects being what they were in the 1960s, I can see why they tried the animated approach. The "cartoon" still managed to incorporate more of the elements and the spirit of the books than Jackson could ever do with any amount of run-time. The difference is that Peter Jackson completed his adaptation, and for that I applaud him.
The problem I had with the cartoon - other than failure to deliver the complete story - is that it was patched together of apparently random stylistic changes. It looked like they farmed segments of the project out to independent teams and didn't enforce an overall plan for how it would be done. IIRC it ranged from "Disney style cartoon" to rotoscoped live action film.
Remember also that this was at the time when the cult film Wizards was popular, an innovative and impressive film at the time, and with a similar theme. The animated take on LoTR might have been a hit, if done better and completed.
> There is plenty of Tolkein left in its pristine unfilmed state, the Silymarilyn
The heartwarming tale about the foolish Marilyn vos Savant of a parallel universe? I hope they make a movie out of that one, too!
> his masterpeace hollywoodized for the consumption of the illiterate masses.
If LoTR was produced by the usual Hollywood crowd...
- Hobbit "Merry" would be a faggot with a penchant for saying things that made everyone else in the movie think he was "Gay", though the audience would know better.
- The ringwraiths would be top-secret robotic soldiers with lasers on their heads, taken over by a "hacker" (Sauron).
- The flight from the Shire to Rivendell would be a car chase.
- The barrow wights would be drug dealers, angry because the car chase crashed through the warehouse right when their big deal was going down.
- Strider would be a 6'1" Brazilian lesbian who wore a chainmail bikini and prefered kickboxing to broadswords. The camera would linger lovingly at the appropriate places, and she would give Arwen a hot kiss in the trailer.
- When the Hobbits first met Strider at Bree, there would be a pole dancer in the background while they talked.
- After the skirmish at weathertop, Elven paratroopers would drop in to rescue the heros just after they had driven off the ringwraiths and didn't need help anymore.
- At the Ford of Isen, the flash flood would be caused because one of the Bad Guys' Henchmen set off the charge and blew the dam a few seconds too late. The cars washed down the river by the flood would go over a waterfall and explode in mid air.
- There would be an enemy mole in the Fellowship, motivated by jealousy over somebody or another.
- The tentacled thingy outside the Gates of Moria would drag the mole to his death. Papers found on his body afterward would tip the Fellowship off that he had been a mole.
- The orcs in Moria would be more drug dealers, angry because the Fellowship interrupted another big deal. Or maybe terrorists planning an attack on the Shire, angry at being discovered before carrying out the plot. The Fellowship would kill about 900 in hand-to-hand combat before they had to flee.
- Ms. Strider would wrestle the balrog while the others fled, losing her top duing the fight but having it CGBra'd back on to preserve the film's rating.
- Lots of explosions in the Moria fight, even though everyone was fighting with knives and crowbars.
- Everyone would get laid at the visit to Galadriel's haven. (Except for Merry, who would spend the evening putting off the advances of a Gay Elven Warrior who came out of the closet due to Merry's charms.) Frodo and Strider would rate a threesome with Galadriel herself.
- Lembas would give the heros Amazing Powers, which would fade just when they needed it most.
- Boromir would break up the Fellowship by making a pass at Merry, never previously having a queer urge in his life. Merry's dignity would be saved by a timely Orc raid.
- ...
Somone else can take it from there...> First franchise not to let fans down?
Great movie, but he was talking about franchises. When we see TMWWBK VII we can revisit this issue.
> What I didn't like was (to paraphrase a great post I read here) that the last 2 movies used vaguesness to simulate depth, and did it poorly.
Significance by obscurity?
> Linguistical the 'a' does not denote a negative.
Sure it does. It's the Greek reflex of the Proto-Indo-European syllabic 'n', which appears in Latin as in and in English as un. The negative ('non', 'not', 'without') is precisely what it denotes:
The raw meaning of 'atheism' is precisely the same as 'godlessness', though of course both have come to have different conventional meanings in modern English. (As per your peeve that I did not quote.) Such are the habits of language.
> I'm sorry but I don't care to talk to some ass-mouthed ninny
Oh, the irony.
> Nice idea! But instead of using a "net", you could use a "fishing rod" with different types of "bait", depending on the type of application you want to catch.
And whenever you had problems you could call the geeky Master Baiters down in tech support for help.
> It really pisses me off when I have to open a Novell or Microsoft support incident (which cost $300 each) and they give me someone in India who I can't understand...
Most companies I call give me someone in the USA that I can't understand. It's nothing to do with IT; it's the crappy pay scale and the sociology of who gets the crappy-paying jobs.