Yes, it's funny that they have no problems bad-mouthing other groups like Catholics or Jews (i.e., Israel) or Christian Fundamentalists because they know that those folks won't get violent.
I'm getting a little sick of people who, to quote Dennis Miller, "start strapping bombs on themselves when the pizza toppings are wrong". I'm getting a little sick of hearing about the Religion of Perpetual Outrage. And I'm really getting sick of slack-jawed, know-nothing, but ego-inflated press abandoning all their principles at the drop of a turban.
Pardon my ignorance, but has there ever been a class-action lawsuit that did anything more than be a mild annoyance to the company in question, enrich a bunch of lawyers and award all the litigants with checks that aren't even worth their time to cash?
That's why I keep coming here after 9 years. The stories aren't often too interesting, the editing, like almost everything on the Web is non-existent, but the comments are a great place to have a good discussion.
I'm not sure what you mean by "walla", but you _did_ spell "aluminum" wrong, from the American point of view. I'm guessing you're British, because you are using the British spelling (and presumably pronunciation) of that word. He in the Colonies, we lose that extra "i". Same with "spelt". Over here, it's spelled (or spelt) "spelled". Perhaps there's a British English spelling module for Firefox because you clearly have the American one.
At a previous job someone commented, when reading an article that "organization" was spelled wrong. It was spelled "organisation". I commented that that was the English spelling. What amazed me was that everyone was incredulous that I actually knew that, which in turn blew my mind. These aren't ignorant teenagers, but professionals in their thirties. I mean, even before the Web, I was well aware that spelling and pronunciation is significantly different in other English-speaking places from reading books and watching Monty Python. I also learned that the BBC would allow boobies on TV.:-)
Yes, some English words are not pronounced as they are spelled, or even spelt. English has borrowed a lot of words from different languages, and is itself as a whole a merging of Romance and Germanic roots. I don't know how it happened, but it amazes me that Spanish is a completely phonetic language. There simply are no exceptions (or if there are, they are very rare) from a certain fairly simple set of rules. Spelling and pronunciation in Spanish are so much easier. However, at the end of the day, if you spend a little time reading actual English written by people who actually know the language, you will learn it, and that's what I believe people are lacking. I've seen statistics about how many books people read, and I find it shocking how little people do read. I mean, I love TV and spend plenty of time parked in front of the computer, but I still manage to read many more books than the average person. Maybe I'm weird. Maybe I'm the anomaly. Maybe I'm a throwback who considers precision in language much more important than it really is in our post-literate world.
It's not just deaf people that have that problem, anyone who reads will eventually pronounce words incorrectly. Of course, no one does that any more, and you can see it in the way people spell. A small part of me dies every time I see "Here! Here" or "rediculous" or "loose" instead of "lose" or the rather novel one I saw recently regarding an old form of money: "gold dablooms".
If you want to learn English, read books, preferably ones written more than 50 years ago. I guarantee you'll lose the bad habits and sound more intelligent.
And no,/. does not count. Nor does Wikipedia. Neither do most magazines and newspapers.
IMO, our whole society is rapidly becoming more illiterate every year.
Take the "loose" thing. I don't recall seeing it before a few years ago (I've been active online '93), yet now it's possibly the most powerful internet meme since "All Your Base", and it's just one of dozens of similar stupid mistakes that are propagated by people who seem to seldom, if ever, see the correct usage of common words.
I'm a hardcore nerd C++ developer and don't actually consider myself particularly well-read, but I can see that a classical liberal education would do everyone a world of good, especially managers and politicians, and that our society suffers greatly from a lack of it. We aren't educated these days, we are trained. There's a big difference and it's to our deteriment. I managed to escape Virginia Tech with a degree in Computer Science in 1987 and I probably didn't have to write more than 3 papers, not counting the elective English classes I took. Even at the time I thought that was ridiculous and I can guarantee it hasn't gotten better in the last 20 years. It's not so much that we are ignorant of history, I'm no historical scholar for certain, I probably know the history of Middle-Earth better than that of Europe, but that we aren't taught how to think, how to reason and how to weigh the constant barrage of seeming-facts which bombard us from every direction. Ultimately, we end up with polarized politics where rhetoric ends up being nothing but canned phrases with no meaning and debate becomes equated with seeing who can shout louder or come up with the cleverest put-downs. In fact, the very term "rhetoric" used to mean the study of persuasion, how to convince people of something using facts, logic, and a fundamental understanding of the human psyche. When is the last time anyone in public life could do that? Modern politics owes more to Goebbels than Aristotle. Our leaders sell geopolitical policy, which will affect our world for generations, with no more depth than a commercial for dish soap ("Brand X stops tyranny better than Brand Y and leave your society with a fresh pine scent").
Um. What was the original topic again? "The Loudness War"? Don't get me started. I've recently bought at least one "remaster"* that was so awful, my 15-year-old cassette tape sounds better. How is it that something can be released when the sound is so boosted it literally dissolves into buzzing. Yet, here we are. It seems all the tremendous leaps in sound quality, studio engineering and whatnot achieved since the 70's has been totally lost for so much of music released today, and I buy quite a bit of music.
* Jon Anderson's "Animation", which, ironically was a very well-produced record and sounded great on vinyl when it was first released in 1983. I'm convinced I could dust off my vinyl copy and master a better sounding CD myself, in fact I could probably do it with a needle, paper cone and a microphone given how awful that CD sounds.
And that's the real problem with Vista. There's no reason to have it. It doesn't do anything new. It doesn't work better than XP. It doesn't even work as well as XP. And it's shackled with a bunch of stupid features that only help avoid problems that the kinds of users on/. wouldn't have in the first place.
If you'd asked me in 1997, having to click "OK" or "Allow" multiple times every time I want to change an icon on the desktop, or copy a file from a USB harddrive isn't exactly what I would have expected to be doing in 2007. This is ludicrous. The software isn't getting smarter, it's getting stupider. I have to OK every little stupid action because there's no way for MS to know if I'm doing it or malware is doing it. It's funny, I don't have these hassles with Linux. MS's attitude is that they simply cannot provide real security so they foist all the responsibility on the user. To me, Vista is a step backwards in usability.
Good thing I'm running Ubuntu, where time actually moves forwards.
Releasing beta code as finished is nothing new for MS, it's just amazing that Vista offers so little after 5 years. In fact, I found it offers _nothing_ new that I am interested in, and network performance is horrible compared to XP or Linux. In fact, performance in general is horrible. It's a crime that Vista is shipped on low-end laptops that aren't anywhere near being able to handle it. I picked up a low-end laptop for my wife with 512MB of RAM. It came with Vista Basic and it drove me insane with how slow it was. I was able to add another GB of RAM and I'm hoping it should be better. I haven't played with it much, but she thinks it's improved. If it gets to be an issue, I might try putting XP on it, but it could be a hassle finding drivers for all the hardware.
And the amazing thing was that Voyager was not initially supposed to go to Uranus or Neptune, or that the NASA boffins managed to re-engineer the thing from over a billion miles away to take better pictures.
That reminds me of the Lisa. If the computer locked up, you have to dismantle it to get the floppy disk out... or at least that's what the computer lab operator at Virginia Tech told me. I found it hilarious how user hostile the early Macs and proto-Macs could be.
People tend to forget that not long before the time Martin Luther came around every book in the world was hand-written. If you have a community of 10,000 people and only one Bible, you are certainly going to keep it locked up somewhere just to keep it safe and there's no way it could be made available to the average Joe. Add to that the fact that most people couldn't read anyway. Don't go propagating myths when there's a much more reasonable explanation.
Don't write us geezers off. I'm 42 and as far as I'm concerned, I "grew up" with computers even if it didn't start until I was about 16 on the Apple ]['s in high school.
Since our education system was designed by proto-socialists in the early 1900's to eliminate individuality, enforce conformity and churn out docile factory workers for the machinery of the Industrial Revolution, and the Teachers' Unions have determined it is in their best interests to keep it that way, our education system is failing everyone, not just the gifted kids.
The intent is to detect any change in ocean circulation that may adversely influence global climate.
Climate change can have huge effects on agriculture, standards of living, and even whether people can live in a certain location, but we all know that real reason is to make sure that the blame is laid on President Bush as soon as any change, however minute, is detected. If it gets warmer, it's Global Warming. If it gets cooler, it's Global Warming. If it stays the same, it's Global Warming.
In the Name of Al Gore, Thomas Malthus and Woodsy the Owl. Amen.
Re:Fox News Reporter == Journalist?
on
Fox Hacks Fark
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· Score: 1
Why should Fox be a news network? CNN, NBC News, CBS News, etc aren't news organizations either are just advocacy groups for the political positions of their owners (or in the case of NBC: psychopathic mass-murderers). Hell, the New York Times has practically stopped pretending they aren't an arm of the Democratic Party.
Personally, I get most of my news from C-SPAN, and I check Drudge periodically just to see if the world has ended.
There's a pattern here that was also the same with DOS, Windows, Netscape, and perhaps others.
Version 1 was awful. Version 2 was a little better. Version 3 was excellent and stable. Version 4 was big and bloated. Version 5 fixed all the problems with version 4 that shouldn't have been made after version 3.
Of course, I played mostly 1ed and a little 2ed. I haven't played since the 3ed came out, but I always liked the 1ed rules with all the leftover nonsense from miniatures and wargames and stuff (1" = 10' indoors, but 30' outdoors).
To be honest I thought TSR was totally jumping the shark by the late 80's with all their "If it's not 'official', you can't use it." crap, and by 1992 or so most of the people I played with had moved out of town.
I really can't speak to WotC, but I thought of software given the comments I've read. "3.5 is stable" "3.5 is buggy"...
So? It still sounds like you should let your kids get dirty now and then. Allergies are increasing at a geometric rate among children. Peanuts have been practically banned in any place where there are children. I don't ever remember hearing about peanut allergies when I was a kid and now there are kids in almost every class with peanut allergies.
Another thing that really helps immune systems is breast feeding, which was really looked down upon in the 60's when I was born (better living through chemistry, you know), but at least now people are coming back to their senses. Of course, given the explosion in artificial ingredients bombarding us from processed food, we are worse off in other ways.
No, I'm not being ridiculous, I'm simply not commenting about a 64-bit Windows version because I didn't know if there was one or not. I don't use 64-bit Windows so I never had a reason to find out. I corrected my comment because I figured there would be a chorus of people criticizing me that there was a 64-bit version for Windows, but I was referring specifically to Linux since I have a couple AMD64 machines that I run Ubuntu on.
To be honest, I find it pretty ludicrous that something like Flash can't be built for 64-bits without much trouble. It's not like it's an OS or anything. How low-level can the code be that it takes more than a few compiler switches and at worst a couple tweaks in the code to build for 64-bits, especially when Flash runs on so many devices?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's funny that they have no problems bad-mouthing other groups like Catholics or Jews (i.e., Israel) or Christian Fundamentalists because they know that those folks won't get violent.
I'm getting a little sick of people who, to quote Dennis Miller, "start strapping bombs on themselves when the pizza toppings are wrong". I'm getting a little sick of hearing about the Religion of Perpetual Outrage. And I'm really getting sick of slack-jawed, know-nothing, but ego-inflated press abandoning all their principles at the drop of a turban.
Pardon my ignorance, but has there ever been a class-action lawsuit that did anything more than be a mild annoyance to the company in question, enrich a bunch of lawyers and award all the litigants with checks that aren't even worth their time to cash?
That's why I keep coming here after 9 years. The stories aren't often too interesting, the editing, like almost everything on the Web is non-existent, but the comments are a great place to have a good discussion.
Basically he ran a story for generating himself money.
And here it is on Slashdot. An article that doesn't really report a concrete truth.
This isn't Slashdot from 1998 any more.
I'm not sure what you mean by "walla", but you _did_ spell "aluminum" wrong, from the American point of view. I'm guessing you're British, because you are using the British spelling (and presumably pronunciation) of that word. He in the Colonies, we lose that extra "i". Same with "spelt". Over here, it's spelled (or spelt) "spelled". Perhaps there's a British English spelling module for Firefox because you clearly have the American one.
:-)
At a previous job someone commented, when reading an article that "organization" was spelled wrong. It was spelled "organisation". I commented that that was the English spelling. What amazed me was that everyone was incredulous that I actually knew that, which in turn blew my mind. These aren't ignorant teenagers, but professionals in their thirties. I mean, even before the Web, I was well aware that spelling and pronunciation is significantly different in other English-speaking places from reading books and watching Monty Python. I also learned that the BBC would allow boobies on TV.
Yes, some English words are not pronounced as they are spelled, or even spelt. English has borrowed a lot of words from different languages, and is itself as a whole a merging of Romance and Germanic roots. I don't know how it happened, but it amazes me that Spanish is a completely phonetic language. There simply are no exceptions (or if there are, they are very rare) from a certain fairly simple set of rules. Spelling and pronunciation in Spanish are so much easier. However, at the end of the day, if you spend a little time reading actual English written by people who actually know the language, you will learn it, and that's what I believe people are lacking. I've seen statistics about how many books people read, and I find it shocking how little people do read. I mean, I love TV and spend plenty of time parked in front of the computer, but I still manage to read many more books than the average person. Maybe I'm weird. Maybe I'm the anomaly. Maybe I'm a throwback who considers precision in language much more important than it really is in our post-literate world.
It's not just deaf people that have that problem, anyone who reads will eventually pronounce words incorrectly. Of course, no one does that any more, and you can see it in the way people spell. A small part of me dies every time I see "Here! Here" or "rediculous" or "loose" instead of "lose" or the rather novel one I saw recently regarding an old form of money: "gold dablooms".
/. does not count. Nor does Wikipedia. Neither do most magazines and newspapers.
If you want to learn English, read books, preferably ones written more than 50 years ago. I guarantee you'll lose the bad habits and sound more intelligent.
And no,
IMO, our whole society is rapidly becoming more illiterate every year.
Take the "loose" thing. I don't recall seeing it before a few years ago (I've been active online '93), yet now it's possibly the most powerful internet meme since "All Your Base", and it's just one of dozens of similar stupid mistakes that are propagated by people who seem to seldom, if ever, see the correct usage of common words.
I'm a hardcore nerd C++ developer and don't actually consider myself particularly well-read, but I can see that a classical liberal education would do everyone a world of good, especially managers and politicians, and that our society suffers greatly from a lack of it. We aren't educated these days, we are trained. There's a big difference and it's to our deteriment. I managed to escape Virginia Tech with a degree in Computer Science in 1987 and I probably didn't have to write more than 3 papers, not counting the elective English classes I took. Even at the time I thought that was ridiculous and I can guarantee it hasn't gotten better in the last 20 years. It's not so much that we are ignorant of history, I'm no historical scholar for certain, I probably know the history of Middle-Earth better than that of Europe, but that we aren't taught how to think, how to reason and how to weigh the constant barrage of seeming-facts which bombard us from every direction. Ultimately, we end up with polarized politics where rhetoric ends up being nothing but canned phrases with no meaning and debate becomes equated with seeing who can shout louder or come up with the cleverest put-downs. In fact, the very term "rhetoric" used to mean the study of persuasion, how to convince people of something using facts, logic, and a fundamental understanding of the human psyche. When is the last time anyone in public life could do that? Modern politics owes more to Goebbels than Aristotle. Our leaders sell geopolitical policy, which will affect our world for generations, with no more depth than a commercial for dish soap ("Brand X stops tyranny better than Brand Y and leave your society with a fresh pine scent").
Um. What was the original topic again? "The Loudness War"? Don't get me started. I've recently bought at least one "remaster"* that was so awful, my 15-year-old cassette tape sounds better. How is it that something can be released when the sound is so boosted it literally dissolves into buzzing. Yet, here we are. It seems all the tremendous leaps in sound quality, studio engineering and whatnot achieved since the 70's has been totally lost for so much of music released today, and I buy quite a bit of music.
* Jon Anderson's "Animation", which, ironically was a very well-produced record and sounded great on vinyl when it was first released in 1983. I'm convinced I could dust off my vinyl copy and master a better sounding CD myself, in fact I could probably do it with a needle, paper cone and a microphone given how awful that CD sounds.
Would you vote for a politican who admitted that he was delightfully baffled by questions of how to fix the economy?
Sure, because he's obviously the first honest candidate in recorded history.
Boy, that story could use some editing. I can't find August 38 on my calendar.
What is it about Web articles that makes people not want to proofread them?
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
When the only tool you own is a hammer, everything on which you use it begins to resemble a thumb." -- ConceptJunkie (1965 - )
And that's the real problem with Vista. There's no reason to have it. It doesn't do anything new. It doesn't work better than XP. It doesn't even work as well as XP. And it's shackled with a bunch of stupid features that only help avoid problems that the kinds of users on /. wouldn't have in the first place.
If you'd asked me in 1997, having to click "OK" or "Allow" multiple times every time I want to change an icon on the desktop, or copy a file from a USB harddrive isn't exactly what I would have expected to be doing in 2007. This is ludicrous. The software isn't getting smarter, it's getting stupider. I have to OK every little stupid action because there's no way for MS to know if I'm doing it or malware is doing it. It's funny, I don't have these hassles with Linux. MS's attitude is that they simply cannot provide real security so they foist all the responsibility on the user. To me, Vista is a step backwards in usability.
Good thing I'm running Ubuntu, where time actually moves forwards.
Releasing beta code as finished is nothing new for MS, it's just amazing that Vista offers so little after 5 years. In fact, I found it offers _nothing_ new that I am interested in, and network performance is horrible compared to XP or Linux. In fact, performance in general is horrible. It's a crime that Vista is shipped on low-end laptops that aren't anywhere near being able to handle it. I picked up a low-end laptop for my wife with 512MB of RAM. It came with Vista Basic and it drove me insane with how slow it was. I was able to add another GB of RAM and I'm hoping it should be better. I haven't played with it much, but she thinks it's improved. If it gets to be an issue, I might try putting XP on it, but it could be a hassle finding drivers for all the hardware.
And the amazing thing was that Voyager was not initially supposed to go to Uranus or Neptune, or that the NASA boffins managed to re-engineer the thing from over a billion miles away to take better pictures.
That reminds me of the Lisa. If the computer locked up, you have to dismantle it to get the floppy disk out... or at least that's what the computer lab operator at Virginia Tech told me. I found it hilarious how user hostile the early Macs and proto-Macs could be.
People tend to forget that not long before the time Martin Luther came around every book in the world was hand-written. If you have a community of 10,000 people and only one Bible, you are certainly going to keep it locked up somewhere just to keep it safe and there's no way it could be made available to the average Joe. Add to that the fact that most people couldn't read anyway. Don't go propagating myths when there's a much more reasonable explanation.
Don't write us geezers off. I'm 42 and as far as I'm concerned, I "grew up" with computers even if it didn't start until I was about 16 on the Apple ]['s in high school.
Since our education system was designed by proto-socialists in the early 1900's to eliminate individuality, enforce conformity and churn out docile factory workers for the machinery of the Industrial Revolution, and the Teachers' Unions have determined it is in their best interests to keep it that way, our education system is failing everyone, not just the gifted kids.
... and they'll buy it. Even if it's crap. It worked for Microsoft Office*.
* Except Excel, Excel is pretty good, but everything else in Office is complete garbage.
The intent is to detect any change in ocean circulation that may adversely influence global climate.
Climate change can have huge effects on agriculture, standards of living, and even whether people can live in a certain location, but we all know that real reason is to make sure that the blame is laid on President Bush as soon as any change, however minute, is detected. If it gets warmer, it's Global Warming. If it gets cooler, it's Global Warming. If it stays the same, it's Global Warming.
In the Name of Al Gore, Thomas Malthus and Woodsy the Owl. Amen.
Why should Fox be a news network? CNN, NBC News, CBS News, etc aren't news organizations either are just advocacy groups for the political positions of their owners (or in the case of NBC: psychopathic mass-murderers). Hell, the New York Times has practically stopped pretending they aren't an arm of the Democratic Party.
Personally, I get most of my news from C-SPAN, and I check Drudge periodically just to see if the world has ended.
Have you listened to the radio lately?
There's a pattern here that was also the same with DOS, Windows, Netscape, and perhaps others.
Version 1 was awful.
Version 2 was a little better.
Version 3 was excellent and stable.
Version 4 was big and bloated.
Version 5 fixed all the problems with version 4 that shouldn't have been made after version 3.
Of course, I played mostly 1ed and a little 2ed. I haven't played since the 3ed came out, but I always liked the 1ed rules with all the leftover nonsense from miniatures and wargames and stuff (1" = 10' indoors, but 30' outdoors).
To be honest I thought TSR was totally jumping the shark by the late 80's with all their "If it's not 'official', you can't use it." crap, and by 1992 or so most of the people I played with had moved out of town.
I really can't speak to WotC, but I thought of software given the comments I've read. "3.5 is stable" "3.5 is buggy"...
So? It still sounds like you should let your kids get dirty now and then. Allergies are increasing at a geometric rate among children. Peanuts have been practically banned in any place where there are children. I don't ever remember hearing about peanut allergies when I was a kid and now there are kids in almost every class with peanut allergies.
Another thing that really helps immune systems is breast feeding, which was really looked down upon in the 60's when I was born (better living through chemistry, you know), but at least now people are coming back to their senses. Of course, given the explosion in artificial ingredients bombarding us from processed food, we are worse off in other ways.
No, I'm not being ridiculous, I'm simply not commenting about a 64-bit Windows version because I didn't know if there was one or not. I don't use 64-bit Windows so I never had a reason to find out. I corrected my comment because I figured there would be a chorus of people criticizing me that there was a 64-bit version for Windows, but I was referring specifically to Linux since I have a couple AMD64 machines that I run Ubuntu on.
To be honest, I find it pretty ludicrous that something like Flash can't be built for 64-bits without much trouble. It's not like it's an OS or anything. How low-level can the code be that it takes more than a few compiler switches and at worst a couple tweaks in the code to build for 64-bits, especially when Flash runs on so many devices?
And yet they still can't (or won't) make a native 64-bit version for Linux is what I meant to say.
Adobe Flash is a well established development platform which runs across all desktop computing platforms.
And yet they still can't (or won't) make a native 64-bit version. I wonder why that is...