Fewer keystrokes: "<ESC>300G" (because "<RET>" isn't required afterwards). (Also, you can omit the <ESC> in either case if you're already in command mode.)
You could say that there's a contract that exists between the all the residents of the country and the tax-payer
I never signed any such contract with my country (the USA).
The tax-payer can also enjoy the benefits that are paid for by tax money
I'd rather choose on what I want to spend my money, instead of Congress and/or George deciding to use it to kill people in Iraq, pay mega-corporations not to grow crops or people not to work, spy on my fellow citizens and me, etc.
Certainly, in my country most people would agree with this idea.
Fine, let the people who "agree with this idea" pay taxes and "reap" the "benefits", if that's really how they want to spend their money, but let me spend my money the way that I want to spend it. But taking my money from me without my consent is robbery.
Specifically: comfortable: [k??.f?(?).t?.b?l] ? [k??f.t?.b?l] (If you don't know IPA,
Unfortunately, as you can see, Slashdot turns many IPA symbols into question marks, so I can't really see what you were trying to show me. However, dictionary.com's pronunciation, which uses ordinary letters, is "kuhmf-tuh-buhl" and "kuhm-fer-tuh-buhl", the second being similar to the way that I pronounce it, with no "ter" in there anywhere. The American Heritage Dictionary entry, further down the page, shows the pronunciations (again, screwed up by Slashdot) "km'fr-t-bl", "kmf't-bl", and "kmf'tr-", the first being most similar to the way that I pronounce it, and the third being most similar to the way that you claim that most Americans pronounce it.
I can cry and scream all I want that the only valid pronunciation of "tsunami" involves actually articulating the "t", although I doubt that you do, because English's phonetics disallow a word from starting with "ts", so people pronounce it as if the "t" were silent.
I pronounce the "t" in "tsunami", though probably not as hard as the Japanese do.
And "psych-" comes from a Greek work starting with the character "Psi", which isn't pronounced the same as "sigh", but rather it actually articulates the "p",
Yeah, well, I do pronounce "ps" as "s" when it begins a word ("psych-", "pseudo-", etc.).
That's because you presume that everyone should speak your Ideolect
No, I don't; I just find it annoying. Similarly, I find Rap and Hip-hop annoying, but that doesn't mean that I "presume" that everyone should listen to rock, jazz, and new-age; it just means that I find Rap and Hip-hop annoying. Note, again, that dictionary.com shows that the correct pronunciation of jewelry is not "joo-ler-ee". (And so forth.) Now, does this mean that people who say "jew-ler-ee" should be beaten with a stick until they pronounce it correctly? Probably not. But it does mean that they are not pronouncing it correctly, at least, not yet. (It's true that it may, at some point, be considered correct, but it isn't yet.)
I speak something that I call English, you speak something that you call English, and we both just simply hope that we'd be able to understand each other.
One of my college professor's parents were from Scotland, and his wife was from the American Deep South. He took his wife back Scotland for a visit. His wife and relatives couldn't understand each other, despite that fact that they both were speaking English; their accents were too different. American English and British English are diverging in many ways, in pronunciation ("issue", "clerk"), spelling ("color" vs "colour"), and even vocabulary ("truck" vs "lorry", "naught" vs "zero"). There are also probably many ways in which they are converging, although I can't think of any off the top of my head ("billion" meaning "thousand million" instead of "thousand thousand million"?). (I sometimes say "lift" instead of "elevator", but that may be due more to the influence of Star Trek than shows on BBC America.)
These are homophones.
Actually, I pronounce "they're" differently than "there" and "their".
These words are pretty much pronounced differently (from some people) but since [?] (from effect) and [a] (from affect) are both very close together, that many people "elide" them together to one vowel.
I think that it is more likely that most of the people who misuse "affect" and "effect" do so because they don't really know the difference between the two.
If you make the noun "Jump" from the verb "[to] jump", then why isn't the verb form fo
"OMG! YOU USED A DOUBLE NEGATIVE YOU'RE GOING TO DIE!!!! YOU'RE UNCLEAN!!!!!1111one"
Actually, I think that such a person would probably not use all caps, would put a period/full stop or exclamation point after the word "negative", and would not use misspellings like "1111one", even jokingly.
For the record, I pronounce "comfortable" with four syllables (though, admittedly, I frequently pronounce it as "kum-fer-tih-bul" or "kum-fr-tih-bul", not "kum-for-tah-bul"), and I find mispronunciations such as "ree-lah-tor" and "joo-lir-y" annoying. (It's "reel-tor" and "joo-well-ree", guys.) I also find annoying "it's" vs "its", "there" vs "they're" vs "their", "effect" vs "affect", and the misuse of compound nouns as verbs (e.g., "setup", "backup", etc. (in fact, most compound nouns ending with "up")), but those are spelling errors, not verbal errors.
I can't recall ever hearing "true" mispronounced "chroo".
President Kennedy also mispronounced "nuclear". For some reason, some people have a mental block where they can't correctly pronounce that word. Here is an actual conversation that I had once with someone who could not pronounce "nuclear" correctly:
Me: Say new. Him: New. Me: Say clear. Him: Clear. Me: Now say new. Clear. Him: New. Clear. Me: Now say both words together. Him: Nuculer.
I don't believe, though, that this occurs primarily in the USA. It wouldn't surprise me if this mispronunciation is prevalent in other parts of the world. However, as a typical American, I don't really pay much attention to what is happening elsewhere in the world, so it's possible that I'm wrong. But since I am an American, I don't believe that I'm wrong, even if I am.
For goods, for services, as a gift, as taxes, or from robbery: these five are pretty intuitive (maybe the intuitive, although I'm not so sure of that) ways, four of which legitimate
You should have written "three of which are legitimate", since taxes are, after all, a form of robbery.
Jury Nullification, or How to Avoid Jury Duty Even If You Don't Want To
Jury Nullification is a legal precedent too, one that should not be ignored but should be thought over honestly and deeply before it is used.
The problem is, people who believe in jury nullification are not allowed to sit on juries. I was called to jury duty just last month, and one of the questions that I had to answer under oath (even though I never took the oath because it ended with the phrase "so help me god", which is a violation of the separation of Church and State) was something along the lines of "Can you decide the guilt or innocence of the defendant based soley on the evidence presented and the judge's instructions, with no outside influence whatsoever?", to which I answered something like "No, I would also use the Constitutions of the United States of America and the State of Georgia." (The actual exchange was longer, but that's the gist of it. Also, I avoided using the term "jury nullification", because I've heard that some people who have used that term were threatened with contempt of court.) I was invited to go home and not come back.
It's kind of sad, too, because I think that I would have made a very good juror.
And how long before we can't read it anymore because the technology has crumbled to dust? I have 9-track tapes in my attic which I am reasonably certain are unreadable -- even if I could find a 9-track drive. Not to mention the HD 5.25-in floppies.
That's why you copy the data from old media to new media. Then, all about which you need to worry is finding software that can interpret your old data.
They don't want you still working in early development stages 2-3 months into a project, because *you* have an ego that seems to think you can spend spend as much time as you want "doing it right". To me at least, it seems that these are the type of people who waste clients' time and money simply so they can tinker. Good for you, you saved 10% memory usage, or wrote it in 10% less code than you would have if you had worked faster. Now give back the thousands of dollars you have just stolen from your client because you felt you had something to prove (whether to yourself and/or others) by trying to attain perfection.
I see this type of attitude more frequently than I'd like. Just remember that 90% (or more) of the total cost of software is spent in maintenance. If you can get it right in the first place, then you won't have to spend as much time and money later fixing bugs. Sometimes you don't have that luxury, but if you can afford to spend a little extra time now to make sure that things work correctly, then you may save yourself a lot of money (and grief) down the road. Also, that 10% less code may be 10% easier to maintain, which could also save money in the long run.
Now, I realize that a viewpoint such as this may not be popular in today's "just throw more hardware at it" world of so-called software engineering, but with Moore's Law finally hitting fundamental limits of physics (at least until fully optical processors or some other breakthrough comes along), I think that understanding how and why things work will become more and more important.
Finally, many computer programmers will not need higher-level math skills to do their jobs, but as has been pointed out in other comments (both here and in TFA), these are computer programmers, not computer scientists. And even these may need some knowledge of some branch of mathematics. (For example, someone working on an accounting package should have at least some accounting skills.)
Even better, you take time to make your parser better at error handling. It can take a lot longer but is probably worth it in the long run. It won't eliminate the need for testing, but thinking through all the things that can go wrong is never a waste of time.
This should be -1 Obvious, but the sad fact is that many, many programs out there don't properly or sufficiently validate their input. Even input from a "trusted" source, such as a DB "owned" by the program, should be checked. There may be cases where there is a semi-valid excuse for not/minimally checking input (e.g., it would slow down a video decoder to the extent that the video would be unplayable), but in these cases at least the code should fail gracefully, and not just crash the program (like the WMV decoder sometimes does to KPlayer/Noatun/MPlayer/Totem/VLC on Linux).
The best time to add such validation is when writing the input routines. Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen, for several reasons:
The programmer writes a "quick and dirty" input routine that is sufficient to get his/her (well-formed) input to the rest of the program, with the view that he/she will write a more robust routine "later". Unfortunately, "later" never seems to come, and the original input routine ends up getting patched and patched as bugs manifest themselves.
The input format is not finalized. Why write a bunch of checking code for a format that might change? And when the input format doesn't change, nobody goes back and revisits the input routines.
A programmer feels that validation is unnecessary because input is coming from a "trusted" source (such as the DB I mentioned above).
An input routine may be written for doing unit testing and the like, with the expectation that it will not be part of the production version of the program. Somehow, though, it manages to find its way into the production version.
Validation code is sometimes tedious to write (i.e., not sexy), and so becomes a lower priority than the more interesting bits of the program.
Right now you have to move the writing surface under the head mechanically. In the future, you'll be able to deflect the beam to the proper location on the drive in one or both axes.
Maybe, but the fact that there isn't any product available now (about which I know, anyway) that does this with a CD/DVD-like medium indicates that there are difficult problems to be overcome in this area.
Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?!
Using two spaces after end-of-sentence periods (full stops) is from monospace typewriter days. It should not be necessary for today's non-monospaced text typer-inners to have to use two spaces to differentiate end-of-sentence periods from, say, end-of-abbreviation periods. Instead, text renderers should determine which periods end sentences and which end abbreviations, and make the spaces following end-of sentence periods slightly larger. Unfortunately, many text renderers (e.g., the one in seamonkey, the browser that I am now using) don't seem to do this. From what I've seen, OO can tell the difference, and uses the appropriate space (en-space for between normal words, including abbreviations, and em-space for between sentences). I assume that any decent word processor will behave similarly. Thus, in most cases, there is no real reason these days to have to use two periods to indicate EOS, any more than it is necessary to manually type a carriage return before reaching column 80. The only exceptions that I can see are when someone is deliberately using a monospace font, or typing a pure ASCII document (such as an RFC) that is meant to be read monospaced.
I have a new theory about the Earth. Ahem. My theory, that I have, follows the lines that I am about to relate. Ahem. The Theory, by A. Elk (that's "A" for Anne", it's not by a elk.) This theory, which belongs to me, is as follows... Ahem. This is how it goes... Ahem. The next thing that I am about to say is my theory. Ahem. Ready? Ahem. The Theory, by A. Elk (Miss). My theory is along the following lines... Ahem.
The Earth is thin at one end; much, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end.
That is the theory that I have and which is mine and what it is, too.
Just build a wall from the North Pole to the South Pole that is a couple of thousand miles high. All of the debris will crash into the wall and fall to the Earth. Now, there is a problem that satellites would also crash into the wall, but the way to solve that is to build the wall with holes in it, so that satellites can pass through undamaged. (Put doors on the holes so that debris can't also pass through the holes, and open the doors only when the satellites approach.) This is such a simple plan; I don't know why it hasn't been implemented.
You may have to have "Willing To Moderate" turned on in order to get to the firehose page, or perhaps you need to have good kharma, or both. I don't know; the GP's post is the first I've ever heard of Firehose, and it worked for me first time when I clicked on his link.
Well, I got to the firehose page, and it looks a lot different to me than the front page. Unfortunately, it requires that JavaScript be enabled in order to premoderate the articles. For people like me (people who have all scripting disabled for security reasons), this make firehose pretty useless (except maybe to see articles and such that will later be rejected).
Mr. Thompson is a huge bigot. He's going for the "persecuted minority"
But huge bigots are persecuted minorities. Everyone from the media to politicians to Slashdotters seem to be persecuting bigots these days. There is even thinly-disguised legislation against bigotry (e.g., the Americans with disabilities act, which discriminates against the "anti-cripple" crowd). About the only bigotry that isn't persecuted these days is that leveed against Arabic Muslims (Thanks, Osama!).
Since my only websites are personal, I appreciate that Nearlyfreespeech.net will shut down public access to my website if it is slashdotted or otherwise DoSed, rather than charging me extra for bandwidth, like most other hosting providers, and will immediately restore access once I have put more money in the "bank". I also like that there is no monthly fee, so I pay only for what I use. (I put in $40 about a year ago or so, and still have over $30 left.)
However, I think that it is a bad idea to have one's web site host and one's domain registrar be the same entity, so I have my domains registered at domaindiscover.com ($9.95/yr for.org). DomainDiscover also allows subdomains (which I haven't used yet, but plan to in the near future), and allows more-or-less direct access to the DB, so one can add, say, AAAA records (for IPv6) and so forth. It also offers free email forwarding. Finally, nothing on the site (of which I know) requires JavaScript (which I have disabled for security reasons), another big plus. I have no complaints so far.
An important issue I would ask you to consider is one that is a top priority for us at Go Daddy - child exploitation or even the potential for it.
When someone uses the "Won't somebody think of the children?" argument to justify his/her actions, check your freedom wallet; some of your rights may be missing. It's time that those in power, whether governments or large corporations, stopped using this argument (along with the "If we don't curtail some of your rights, the terrorists have already won.") to justify their abuses.
the directions state what is to be done clearly and concisely.
No, they don't. In fact, there are no "directions" at all. The researchers simply stated the procedure they used to perform their experiment, and the results thus obtained. If you were to follow their "directions", you would soak the sponge in bacteria-laden wastewater prior to putting it in the microwave oven. It is understandable that many people would want to skip that step. That said, it is still surprising that people didn't wet their sponges, as the researchers indicated that it was probably the heated water, not the microwaves, that killed the bacteria.
Slashdot Mirror
(Also, you can omit the <ESC> in either case if you're already in command mode.)
But taking my money from me without my consent is robbery.
Unfortunately, as you can see, Slashdot turns many IPA symbols into question marks, so I can't really see what you were trying to show me.
However, dictionary.com's pronunciation, which uses ordinary letters, is "kuhmf-tuh-buhl" and "kuhm-fer-tuh-buhl", the second being similar to the way that I pronounce it, with no "ter" in there anywhere.
The American Heritage Dictionary entry, further down the page, shows the pronunciations (again, screwed up by Slashdot) "km'fr-t-bl", "kmf't-bl", and "kmf'tr-", the first being most similar to the way that I pronounce it, and the third being most similar to the way that you claim that most Americans pronounce it.
I pronounce the "t" in "tsunami", though probably not as hard as the Japanese do.
Yeah, well, I do pronounce "ps" as "s" when it begins a word ("psych-", "pseudo-", etc.).
No, I don't; I just find it annoying.
Similarly, I find Rap and Hip-hop annoying, but that doesn't mean that I "presume" that everyone should listen to rock, jazz, and new-age; it just means that I find Rap and Hip-hop annoying.
Note, again, that dictionary.com shows that the correct pronunciation of jewelry is not "joo-ler-ee".
(And so forth.)
Now, does this mean that people who say "jew-ler-ee" should be beaten with a stick until they pronounce it correctly?
Probably not.
But it does mean that they are not pronouncing it correctly, at least, not yet.
(It's true that it may, at some point, be considered correct, but it isn't yet.)
One of my college professor's parents were from Scotland, and his wife was from the American Deep South.
He took his wife back Scotland for a visit.
His wife and relatives couldn't understand each other, despite that fact that they both were speaking English; their accents were too different.
American English and British English are diverging in many ways, in pronunciation ("issue", "clerk"), spelling ("color" vs "colour"), and even vocabulary ("truck" vs "lorry", "naught" vs "zero").
There are also probably many ways in which they are converging, although I can't think of any off the top of my head ("billion" meaning "thousand million" instead of "thousand thousand million"?).
(I sometimes say "lift" instead of "elevator", but that may be due more to the influence of Star Trek than shows on BBC America.)
Actually, I pronounce "they're" differently than "there" and "their".
I think that it is more likely that most of the people who misuse "affect" and "effect" do so because they don't really know the difference between the two.
For the record, I pronounce "comfortable" with four syllables (though, admittedly, I frequently pronounce it as "kum-fer-tih-bul" or "kum-fr-tih-bul", not "kum-for-tah-bul"), and I find mispronunciations such as "ree-lah-tor" and "joo-lir-y" annoying.
(It's "reel-tor" and "joo-well-ree", guys.)
I also find annoying "it's" vs "its", "there" vs "they're" vs "their", "effect" vs "affect", and the misuse of compound nouns as verbs (e.g., "setup", "backup", etc. (in fact, most compound nouns ending with "up")), but those are spelling errors, not verbal errors.
I can't recall ever hearing "true" mispronounced "chroo".
President Kennedy also mispronounced "nuclear".
For some reason, some people have a mental block where they can't correctly pronounce that word.
Here is an actual conversation that I had once with someone who could not pronounce "nuclear" correctly:I don't believe, though, that this occurs primarily in the USA.
It wouldn't surprise me if this mispronunciation is prevalent in other parts of the world.
However, as a typical American, I don't really pay much attention to what is happening elsewhere in the world, so it's possible that I'm wrong.
But since I am an American, I don't believe that I'm wrong, even if I am.
I was called to jury duty just last month, and one of the questions that I had to answer under oath (even though I never took the oath because it ended with the phrase "so help me god", which is a violation of the separation of Church and State) was something along the lines of "Can you decide the guilt or innocence of the defendant based soley on the evidence presented and the judge's instructions, with no outside influence whatsoever?", to which I answered something like "No, I would also use the Constitutions of the United States of America and the State of Georgia."
(The actual exchange was longer, but that's the gist of it.
Also, I avoided using the term "jury nullification", because I've heard that some people who have used that term were threatened with contempt of court.)
I was invited to go home and not come back.
It's kind of sad, too, because I think that I would have made a very good juror.
Then, all about which you need to worry is finding software that can interpret your old data.
Just remember that 90% (or more) of the total cost of software is spent in maintenance.
If you can get it right in the first place, then you won't have to spend as much time and money later fixing bugs.
Sometimes you don't have that luxury, but if you can afford to spend a little extra time now to make sure that things work correctly, then you may save yourself a lot of money (and grief) down the road.
Also, that 10% less code may be 10% easier to maintain, which could also save money in the long run.
Now, I realize that a viewpoint such as this may not be popular in today's "just throw more hardware at it" world of so-called software engineering, but with Moore's Law finally hitting fundamental limits of physics (at least until fully optical processors or some other breakthrough comes along), I think that understanding how and why things work will become more and more important.
Finally, many computer programmers will not need higher-level math skills to do their jobs, but as has been pointed out in other comments (both here and in TFA), these are computer programmers, not computer scientists.
And even these may need some knowledge of some branch of mathematics.
(For example, someone working on an accounting package should have at least some accounting skills.)
Even input from a "trusted" source, such as a DB "owned" by the program, should be checked.
There may be cases where there is a semi-valid excuse for not/minimally checking input (e.g., it would slow down a video decoder to the extent that the video would be unplayable), but in these cases at least the code should fail gracefully, and not just crash the program (like the WMV decoder sometimes does to KPlayer/Noatun/MPlayer/Totem/VLC on Linux).
The best time to add such validation is when writing the input routines.
Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen, for several reasons:
Unfortunately, "later" never seems to come, and the original input routine ends up getting patched and patched as bugs manifest themselves.
Why write a bunch of checking code for a format that might change?
And when the input format doesn't change, nobody goes back and revisits the input routines.
Somehow, though, it manages to find its way into the production version.
It should not be necessary for today's non-monospaced text typer-inners to have to use two spaces to differentiate end-of-sentence periods from, say, end-of-abbreviation periods.
Instead, text renderers should determine which periods end sentences and which end abbreviations, and make the spaces following end-of sentence periods slightly larger.
Unfortunately, many text renderers (e.g., the one in seamonkey, the browser that I am now using) don't seem to do this.
From what I've seen, OO can tell the difference, and uses the appropriate space (en-space for between normal words, including abbreviations, and em-space for between sentences).
I assume that any decent word processor will behave similarly.
Thus, in most cases, there is no real reason these days to have to use two periods to indicate EOS, any more than it is necessary to manually type a carriage return before reaching column 80.
The only exceptions that I can see are when someone is deliberately using a monospace font, or typing a pure ASCII document (such as an RFC) that is meant to be read monospaced.
Microsoft Vista.
From the winky pedia entry:--Anne Elk (Miss)
Just build a wall from the North Pole to the South Pole that is a couple of thousand miles high.
All of the debris will crash into the wall and fall to the Earth.
Now, there is a problem that satellites would also crash into the wall, but the way to solve that is to build the wall with holes in it, so that satellites can pass through undamaged.
(Put doors on the holes so that debris can't also pass through the holes, and open the doors only when the satellites approach.)
This is such a simple plan; I don't know why it hasn't been implemented.
You may have to have "Willing To Moderate" turned on in order to get to the firehose page, or perhaps you need to have good kharma, or both.
I don't know; the GP's post is the first I've ever heard of Firehose, and it worked for me first time when I clicked on his link.
Well, I got to the firehose page, and it looks a lot different to me than the front page.
Unfortunately, it requires that JavaScript be enabled in order to premoderate the articles.
For people like me (people who have all scripting disabled for security reasons), this make firehose pretty useless (except maybe to see articles and such that will later be rejected).
Everyone from the media to politicians to Slashdotters seem to be persecuting bigots these days.
There is even thinly-disguised legislation against bigotry (e.g., the Americans with disabilities act, which discriminates against the "anti-cripple" crowd).
About the only bigotry that isn't persecuted these days is that leveed against Arabic Muslims (Thanks, Osama!).
Are you saying that they restore from one month into the future?
That's some neat trick!
Since my only websites are personal, I appreciate that Nearlyfreespeech.net will shut down public access to my website if it is slashdotted or otherwise DoSed, rather than charging me extra for bandwidth, like most other hosting providers, and will immediately restore access once I have put more money in the "bank".
.org).
I also like that there is no monthly fee, so I pay only for what I use.
(I put in $40 about a year ago or so, and still have over $30 left.)
However, I think that it is a bad idea to have one's web site host and one's domain registrar be the same entity, so I have my domains registered at domaindiscover.com ($9.95/yr for
DomainDiscover also allows subdomains (which I haven't used yet, but plan to in the near future), and allows more-or-less direct access to the DB, so one can add, say, AAAA records (for IPv6) and so forth.
It also offers free email forwarding.
Finally, nothing on the site (of which I know) requires JavaScript (which I have disabled for security reasons), another big plus.
I have no complaints so far.
The robot on "Lost in Space" had more facial expressions than Barbara Bain.
It's time that those in power, whether governments or large corporations, stopped using this argument (along with the "If we don't curtail some of your rights, the terrorists have already won.") to justify their abuses.
In fact, there are no "directions" at all.
The researchers simply stated the procedure they used to perform their experiment, and the results thus obtained.
If you were to follow their "directions", you would soak the sponge in bacteria-laden wastewater prior to putting it in the microwave oven.
It is understandable that many people would want to skip that step.
That said, it is still surprising that people didn't wet their sponges, as the researchers indicated that it was probably the heated water, not the microwaves, that killed the bacteria.