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User: Estanislao+Mart�nez

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  1. Re:"Because some dude made up a rule that says so. on The Great Typo Hunt · · Score: 1

    I would put an insistence on using "less" instead of "fewer" on the same level of insisting on calling Canis familiaris "doggy" rather than "dog". There's no loss in understanding, it's common enough that it's not utterly jarring, it just identifies the speaker as either uneducated, or a child.

    Why do you think it identifies the speaker as "uneducated"? Have you actually researched how educated people speak and write?

  2. Re:Best answer so far. on The Great Typo Hunt · · Score: 1

    It's not my judgement to make - that's been accepted usage for centuries.

    And now I'm going to have to ask you to substantiate this claim at depth. I mean, not just cite some manuals as evidence, but also explain why we should take those manuals as evidence that the rule has been accepted usage for centuries.

    Let me preemptively link to this Amazon review of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage , simply because it cites that book's entry on the "less/fewer" issue (and I don't have the book with me right now). Basically, the claim that the rule in question has been accepted usage for centuries runs afoul of the fact that the counterexamples go back about 900 years before the rule was formulated, without anybody taking care to complain about how "wrong" they were. (And hell, Baker himself, first guy to state the rule, said that less was "most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think Fewer would do better." Which if anything suggests that the rule was more likely in contrast to accepted usage.

  3. Re:BS on The Great Typo Hunt · · Score: 1

    The "eats shoots and leaves" example actually supports my point #4: "Pretty much any argument about 'bad grammar' that's based on the ambiguity of a constructed example sentence presented without any context where it would be used is bullshit. Context routinely disambiguates language."

    Why? Because the "eats shoots and leaves" joke relies on constructing an elaborate and implausible counterfactual context where (at least) the following conditions hold:

    1. There exists at least one panda who is capable of talking.
    2. This panda eats sandwiches.
    3. This very same panda has procured a firearm and ammunition.
    4. The panda knows how to fire the gun.
    5. The panda has good enough aim to hit many patrons with its shots.
    6. The panda some-damn-how is anatomically capable of not just handling the gun and shooting it, but of doing so repeatedly in quick succession with good aim.
    7. The panda is somehow aware of the contents of the wildlife manual. Oh, and he has a wildlife manual.
    8. The patrons somehow don't get the hell out of dodge when a talking panda comes into the café. (And yeah, bonus points if the panda's gun is not concealed!)

    Without setting up all that elaborate context, there is no way that anybody would possibly interpret the (incorrectly puntuated, granted) phrase "eats, shoots and leaves" in the way that the joke requires.

  4. Some dude says so. on The Great Typo Hunt · · Score: 1

    'This Word is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think Fewer would do better. "No Fewer than a Hundred" appears to me, not only more elegant than "No less than a Hundred," but more strictly proper.'

    So, some dude from 1770 thought it was "more elegant" and "more strictly proper." In what sense was he correct about this judgement?

  5. Re:"Because some dude made up a rule that says so. on The Great Typo Hunt · · Score: 1

    Really, what is grammar but a bunch of rules that we've agreed to use?

    But the thing is that that's an uncommon, technical sense of "agree." We didn't have a convention where we all sat down and indicated our assent to a bunch of rules that Mr. Dude proposed. The "agreement" is more like this: we all carry out the practice of using the word "dog" to mean Canis familiaris. We all assume that English-speaking strangers also do. This assumption is rarely (if ever) contradicted by anybody we'd call an English speaker. An English speaker who insisted too vehemently otherwise would likely be seen as mentally insane, or at least not serious.

    Do you really think that "less is only used with mass nouns" a rule of grammar in that sense?

  6. Soy meat. on The Great Typo Hunt · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Vegetarian chilli-con-carne" is no more an oxymoron that "soy meat" is. There are plenty of so-called intensional or non-intersective grammatical constructions, where modifying X with Y results in an expression that is not an X. A "fake Rolex" is not a Rolex; it's something that's pretending to be a Rolex. Likewise, "vegetarian chili con carne" is not chili con carne; it's a vegetarian dish that substitutes for chili con carne.

  7. You may want to finish that quote. on The Great Typo Hunt · · Score: 3, Informative

    From dictionary.com: "Even though less has been used before plural nouns ( less words; less men ) since the time of King Alfred, many modern usage guides say that only fewer can be used in such contexts. Less, they say, should modify singular mass nouns ( less sugar; less money ) and singular abstract nouns ( less honesty; less love ). It should modify plural nouns only when they suggest combination into a unit, group, or aggregation: less than $50 (a sum of money); less than three miles (a unit of distance). With plural nouns specifying individuals or readily distinguishable units, the guides say that fewer is the only proper choice: fewer words; fewer men; no fewer than 31 of the 50 states."

    You know, that quote continues. The next sentence after you cut it off: "Modern standard English practice does not reflect this distinction."

    Note that they said standard. The entry is actually endorsing the use of constructions like less words and less men.

    It's no surprise that people don't understand this distinction. Look at the confusion around the word data, which has become popular over the last decade or two to treat as a plural ("The data suggest..." when it should be "The data suggests..."). I'm quite certain that many people will protest this post, that "data" is plural, and treating it as such is correct.

    Um, from dictionary.com: "data (noun): a pl. of datum." Yes, the very same source that you misleadingly cite as an authority above for less/fewer.

    If "data" is plural, then so are the following: sugar, information, hair, media, agenda...

    Care to actually argue why? I can't tell you how wrong you are about that unless you spell out why you think so.

  8. Best answer so far. on The Great Typo Hunt · · Score: 1

    Because it's convention. Why do we use the word "water" to mean that liquidy stuff you find in lakes? Why does "the" refer to a specific instance of an entity and "a" applies to any given instance of an entity?

    You've given the best answer so far.

    Still not enough, though, because you've failed to address this: what are the criteria that you're using to judge that the "fewer" vs. "less" rule that you cite is in fact the convention?

  9. Did you actually read my question? on The Great Typo Hunt · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    If you're actually interested: fewer relates to countable nouns, less to uncountable. Less water, fewer glasses. "Less glasses" sounds as wrong as "fewer water".

    Did you actually read what I posted? I explicitly said that I would not accept any explanation "that consists of simply restating the rule in question in complicated and impressive-sounding language that may or may not betray the fact that the explainer has never been to a Linguistics 101 course."

    You get a few points on using "countable" and "uncountable." Now answer my question and explain to me why you insist that "fewer relates to countable nouns, less to uncountable."

  10. Bullshit. on The Great Typo Hunt · · Score: 2, Funny

    And, most people fail to realize that this is a problem because the word should be "fewer" not "less".

    So, come on, explain to my why this is (allegedly) so. Explanations that won't be accepted:

    • Because some dude made up a rule that says so.
    • Any explanation that consists of simply restating the rule in question in complicated and impressive-sounding language that may or may not betray the fact that the explainer has never been to a Linguistics 101 course.
  11. BS on The Great Typo Hunt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Consider the missing comma here: "Mary had freckles on her but we liked her anyway." Without the comma, one could infer that Mary's ass was speckled.

    That's nonsense on several counts.

    1. But is spelled differently than butt.
    2. No comma is necessary in sentences like your example. By which I mean you're going to find plenty of examples of excellent writers routinely dispensing with the comma in parallel grammatical structures.
    3. If the sentence was spoken, intonation would make it quite clear what was meant. The pitch on the but would be higher than butt.
    4. Pretty much any argument about "bad grammar" that's based on the ambiguity of a constructed example sentence presented without any context where it would be used is bullshit. Context routinely disambiguates language.
  12. Re:Question: on Larry Ellison Rips HP Board a New One · · Score: 1

    All good points, but what about the 3rd case where neither are able to give consent? Does the lack of ability to give consent mean they also aren't capable of seeing consent can't be given by the other? When both were drunk, can a man counter-charge rape on the girl if the girl charges rape against him?

    There are several problems with this whole thread.

    First, rape of drunk women doesn't normally about mean that the woman is a bit tipsy. Rather, it's that the woman is passed out or nearly so--very often from drinks that were given to her by the perpetrator or his friends when she was already very drunk (highly slurred speech, seriously impaired coordination), with the intent to make her compliant.

    Second, no matter how drunk he may have been, a man can't seriously claim that he did not consent to sex if he, under no coercion to do so, climbs on top of an unconscious woman, spreads her legs apart and penetrates her. The actions show a deliberate choice to rape the woman.

    Philosophically, this is a more interesting scenario.

    Criminologically or morally, however, it's bullshit, because it's a contrived scenario that's departing from the common case, which remains systematically unpunished.

  13. Defending the Constitution, huh? on How Will Contemporary War Games Affect Veterans? · · Score: 1

    You assume that everyone thinks as you do and that nobody would enlist for good reasons. There are good reasons, you just don't think they are. To support and defend the constitution. Dad and Grandpa, and all the way down the line, were soldiers. You feel it is your calling. You want to protect the weak. You want to be a hero. You want to serve your country.

    You see, the problem here is that you want to defend the decision to enlist in terms of the intentions of the guy who enlisted. But as far as I'm concerned (and I suspect drinkypoo's gonna agree with me), a person's actions should not be judged by intention, but by a combination of factors that gives priority to their effect, to the extent actor could have reasonably judged it. By this standard, drinkypoo's argument is basically that in the recent past, people who have enlisted you're basically doing something with negative effects that they should have foreseen.

    And when it comes down to it, American soldiers' actions over the past 10 years haven't really been supporting or defending the Constitution or the values it defends. The arbitrary and indefinite imprisonment of enemy combatants in Guantanamo is the prime example, where the armed forces undertook a policy that is contrary to the rights and values that the Constitution is supposed to enshrine.

  14. You're missing a fact here on The Recovery Disc Rip-Off · · Score: 1

    Some of the disks that come with Macs are specially coded to recognize what machines they "belong to," and will refuse to install if you try to use it on a different machine. So, for example, here at work I once tried to restore a 15" MBP with an OS disc from a 17" model; the disk's software told me that the disk was not for that model of Mac.

  15. Not actually zoning... on Officials Use Google Earth To Find Unlicensed Pools · · Score: 1

    Zoning is about regulating the uses of land: for example, to forbid your new neighbor from turning his house in your quiet neighborhood into a loud, high-traffic business. The pool permits stuff is about enforcement of building codes, which exist for safety.

    Why is this distinction important? Because one can reasonably be very critical of zoning policies in the USA while approving of the general building codes.

  16. yeah, right on Officials Use Google Earth To Find Unlicensed Pools · · Score: 1

    Without mandatory permitting processes homeowners would maintain this documentation or else they'd be forced to sell their home at a discount.

    Because, as economics teaches us, every buyer always manages to obtain perfect information about what they're buying.

  17. Breaking headline on Electric Car Subsidies As Handouts For the Rich · · Score: 1

    I don't know where they are getting their demographics from, but I have many examples where they are wrong.

    BREAKING HEADLINE: 20% of people are different to the other 80%. News at 11.

  18. Interesting idea. on Microsoft Tech Can Deblur Images Automatically · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What about combining the accelerometer data with a setting that records low-light images is a series of high-speed, underexposed images, then just using to accelerometer data to merge them?

    I think the problem with any method that doesn't change the optical path or move the sensor is that it just can't deal with parallax.

    So, your accelerometer records that between the first and the second microexposure, the camera shifted by x amount to the left. What relative shift do you apply to the frames? Well, the problem is that the correct shift is different for objects at different distances--so as soon as you have an image with large depth of field, there is no solution that corrects the blur for all objects in the frame. It might still be useful, though, because you'd be able to reduce camera blur at one distance--e.g., the camera could assume that the correct distance is the focus distance, or if you used RAW processing, you might be able to choose the correction distance at processing time.

    Note that optical stabilization systems don't have this problem to the same degree, because they're designed to keep the same ray of light hitting the same pixel during the whole exposure.

    There are other complications, though, because each of the microexposures will have more noise and reduced dynamic range compared to the full conventional exposure. I.e., by spending less time recording the value of a pixel, a microexposure is correspondingly less able to finely discriminate its level, and more so when the pixel is dark. Combining the microexposures has the potential to average out the noise, thus gaining you more shadow detail and dynamic range; theoretically you can get the same dynamic range and noise floor as the conventional exposure, but in practice it might well be different. There's a problem, however, that if the sensor noise is not random, the accelerometric shifts you apply to the microexposures as you combine them runs the risk of producing noise artifacts, as the pattern of the noise might produce interference patterns when superimposed on shifted copies of itself (see moiré, or more generally, interference). That's because, to put it briefly, camera motion moves the apparent position of the objects in the frame, but doesn't move the noise patterns.

    Yeah, this stuff is complicated.

  19. I think you oughta look at the examples. on Microsoft Tech Can Deblur Images Automatically · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There are some full-size samples of the results of the technique, where you can compare the original image with the result of their technique, and the results of two older techniques. Their technique show some very obvious problems:

    1. Doubling of high-contrast edges that are "ghosted" in the original because of the motion blur. In the original, presumably, the motion was something like this: start at position A, hold for a relatively large fraction of the exposure, then quickly move to position B, and hold for another large fraction of the exposure. This means that the photo records two copies of any high-constrast edges, one corresponding to A, and the other to B.

      There are several examples in the link that seem to be like that. The technique doesn't seem to figure this out in all cases, and renders the two ghost lines as separate, sharp lines. Most obvious example: the edge of the front rim of the red car in the second photo. Though compare with the result they got in the photo of the Coca-Cola cans, where it did figure it out for the rack, but not for the text on the cans, and where it introduced some artifact lines perpendicular to the rack.

    2. Severe white sharpening halos around edges.

    The more instructive comparison is the results of these guys' techniques with the older techniques. Clearly, they're doing a lot better than the older techniques. Still, this is very far away from primetime, IMO.

  20. But let's make sure we understand what it does... on Microsoft Tech Can Deblur Images Automatically · · Score: 1

    This is like one of those "Why didn't I think of that?" ideas that you wonder why your camera doesn't already have.

    Well, many cameras have optical vibration reduction, either on the lenses or using a sensor-shift mechanism. This mechanism, to the extent that it works, should work better than the software solution being described in the article.

    It's important to understand that random camera motion blur in almost all cases leads to information loss. The rays of light that would have hit only one pixel if the camera had been steady, because of the motion, will end up hitting more than one pixel--whereas moving the lens elements or sensor tends to keep the same pixel aligned with the same point of the photographic subject.

    My guess is that recording the motion of the camera and doing the post-processing described in the article will reintroduce some acutance to the image (high-contrast edges will be sharper), but that there will still be a significant loss of resolution (the finest detail that can be recorded). So, for example, the edge of a person's face will be reasonably sharp, but there won't be a lot of detail on the hair or skin.

  21. Are you sure of that? on Microsoft Tech Can Deblur Images Automatically · · Score: 1

    Although technically, the blur in the image itself already recorded the motion, with better precision and without calibration issues.

    Not unless you know the sizes of all the objects that made it into the frame, and the distance of each to the camera. The camera, without this sort of motion sensor, at most knows the focus distance and view angle, so *maybe* it can guess the height and width of objects at the plane of focus--but then the problem becomes knowing which pixels are recording the object at the plane of focus.

    But anyway, if you know the focus distance, view angle and camera motion, you can apply some corrections that are likely to improve acutance of objects at the plane of focus, and maybe regain some resolution. It wouldn't turn a photo with motion blur into the equivalent of one without, because motion blur causes information loss, which will show up as loss of resolution. Or in other words, the correction will probably make large high-contrast edges look sharper, but there will be some loss of fine detail due to the motion.

  22. Don't discount it too soon. on How Should a Non-Techie Learn Programming? · · Score: 1

    Database programming is the most boring shit ever.

    Some kinds of database programming only. Transactional applications can be very boring, yes; they tend to be about inserting and looking up single records. Analytics, on the other hand, can be pretty interesting, because it becomes about how to use large data sets to answer complicated questions. Basically, the more interesting kinds of database programming are a more advanced, larger-scale version of the stuff that the more advanced spreadsheet users tend to do.

  23. Why not start with databases? on How Should a Non-Techie Learn Programming? · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't start with database stuff until you have a programming language or two mastered [...]

    Frankly, I don't see why somebody shouldn't start with databases if they feel so inclined, other than contingent practical obstacles (many books about databases assume you already know how to program). There's a lot of very useful stuff you can do with databases even if you don't know how to program. You can load data sets into a database and write custom queries that answer all sorts of useful questions about the data, just by knowing how to use a graphical client and a moderate amount of SQL.

    For somebody who's more into the market side of things rather than the programming side, actually, data modeling knowledge might be more useful than strict programming knowledge.

    I second the MySQL = FAIL assessment.

  24. Use your thumb to click. on Apple Launches New Magical Trackpad, 12 Core Macs · · Score: 1

    The previous Mac laptops had a separate button at the bottom of the trackpad. This is why the new ones' buttonless design is like you point out: it works with the same muscular habits as the older ones. I was used to the old one, then when I got a newer model I adjusted very quickly (after I made the same assumption you did, though).

    I call it affordance fail, though: nothing about the design of the new pad makes it perceptible that the bottom edge is the clickable part.

  25. Re:Apple stole a week of my time... on Apple Launches New Magical Trackpad, 12 Core Macs · · Score: 1

    Though obviously the next question is "Why make a case-sensitive application in the first place?".

    Because coders are, as a general rule, morons. Who think they're very smart. And therefore conclude that case-sensitivity is somehow a feature, not a flaw, because Linus and RMS and the Unix way and lol noobs lol.