"Soul Food" is the politically correct label for African-American food. Think fried chicken & waffles, collard greens, okra, grits, chitluns... Basically southern food that was traditionally popular with the less economically-advantaged people in the south.
...because it was only a week or two ago. Depending on the day, they are worth between $1.55 to $1.85 a pound at my local scrap recycling company. They pay for plastic & glass too (even non-redemption glass is worth half a cent per pound). It was my understanding that this was the norm (at least in the U.S.). Where is it that you have to pay to recycle? What gave you the impression that you could no longer recycle aluminum cans by the pound for money?
I would question whether anyone with tattoos actually is any kind of geek, especially a math or science geek. We're supposed to be logical and have superior reasoning abilities, and there's absolutely nothing logical or reasonable about getting ink permanently injected into your skin.
There's nothing logical or reasonable about making your toaster run linux either, but it's considered a mark of true geekdom. Not all geeks have to be Vulcans. I think getting a tattoo of physics equations or a perl script or whatever to be incredibly geeky.
If you want art, get it on paper or canvas so you can pass it down to your descendants, not something that's destined to die when you do and that you can never sell or easily get rid of.
You can pass down your tattoo to your descendants... Just leave instructions in your will to be skinned and have your hide turned into a nice human-leather wall-hanging. (There's also photos & memories if you're squeamish).
Tattooing is a fad that comes and goes over the years; it was popular among the flappers in the 1920s and popular among WWII and Korean War soldiers. Today's tattoo fad comes to us courtesy of the American Prison Syetem, just like that other retarded fad, the pants halfway down with boxers showing.
Now tell these guys to GOML with their illogical fad following. Here's a hint for them -- you're never cool when you're trying to be. If you have tattoos, you might not belong at slashdot.
I know you're an old-timer, but tattoos aren't just for felons and soldiers anymore. They have actually achieved pretty wide mainstream acceptance. Kind of like how computers aren't just for geeks anymore.
Now, personally, I know I'm too fickle to commit to something that permanent on my body. But if other geeks want to decorate their skin with some geek-tribe symbols, I totally approve.
P.S. Discrimination for employment (or anything else) based on the existence of a tattoo should be punished as harshly as discrimination based on race, hair color, or sexual orientation. (However, an employer should be free to set a policy that tattoos must be covered while in uniform, as long as that policy is applied equally).
From what I've heard, The Netherlands seems like one of the sanest countries around. How necessary is it to speak Dutch to live there? Could an english-speaking american ex-pat get by ok?
I don't want to leave my home country but if it keeps marching toward Christian Police State I would like a backup plan.
I dislike the Fisher Price look of default XP, so I disable all the visual effects ("set to best performance") so it ends up looking a lot like '95, but I do use the XP start menu. I also enable the quick launch but take everything out of it except for the "show desktop" button.
And my favorite screensaver is still "Mystify", which dates back to Windows 3.x or possibly even further...
Hi there. I know you're probably a troll, but I'm going to respond to you as if you were serious.
Please note I am a professionally trained chef.
The practice of "resting" meat is important. If you cut into a steak that's hot off the grill, you will see a whole bunch of liquid run out and make a pool on your plate. Think of this as a pool of flavor that you just drained out of your steak. If you give it a few minutes to cool down a little and let the fat congeal, it won't go running out, and you will experience all the intended fatty goodness in every bite.
P.S. If your steak is actually *cold*, then yes somebody is doing something wrong.
I once accidentally breathed in a very small amount of chlorine gas.
I was coughing my lungs up for weeks.
This gave some very intimate appreciation of the horrors of the gas attacks in the trenches.
I once had the same effect after accidentally inhaling a face-full of balsamic vinegar steam. Not fun. Worst thing I've ever had in my lungs (even worse than pepper spray). Was coughing and short of breath for weeks.
Exactly, dehumanizing the enemy is a necessary part of war if your soldiers aren't sociopaths (and the US military is fairly good at weeding those out).
Mo, the US military has almost nothing else. How, the fuck do you think they keep managing to find scum to send all around the world fucking America in the ass? Keep in mind, the US military hasn't been used for anything except fucking the world for the sake of a few very rich sociopaths since world war 2. So given that, your assertion that the members of the US military are anything but sociopathic traitors is batshit insane. If they had a scrap of integrity they would have killed themselves long before obeying criminal, treasonous orders to fuck their country.
Seriously, try thinking not just spouting the idiotic militaristic propaganda you've been spoonfed.
I agree with you that in recent decades the U.S. military has mostly been used as a beatstick to protect the interests of a small handful of wealthy sociopathic elite. However, most of the soldiers aren't bad people. They are mostly ignorant, uneducated people who truly believe the lie that they are fighting the good fight and doing what needs to be done. It's not that they lack integrity, they genuinely don't know that what they are doing is traitorous to their country and their planet. Only a small handful at the very top qualify as "sociopathic traitors".
I can't think of anything that's morally wrong that doesn't cause harm. Did I read the wrong FA?
I was beginning to wonder if I had a magnet on my head because I can't think of anything morally wrong that doesn't cause harm either. Glad to know I'm not the only one that thinks this way.
I suspect religion may be the real culprit here, because that's the only place I can think of where things that cause no actual harm are called morally wrong.
On that note, did we just stumble across the area of the brain responsible for religion/magical thinking? Can many of the world's problems be solved with mandatory magnetic hats?
You also said:
Adultery is immoral (and harmful)
I contend that is not necessarily always the case. Open relationships can and do work. The main practical problem with adultery is the dishonesty that typically surrounds it, and that indeed causes harm, which in that case makes it immoral, but adultery doesn't necessarily have to be dishonest or harmful.
So you're saying something that you don't actually believe just to upset the people who take you seriously? Seems like some sort of weird, desperate, misguided grab for the wrong kind of attention. Or is it just pure malice, spreading negative emotions like nails on the freeway?
I would actually have more respect for a misguided racist individual who truly believes in "nigger grease" than for someone who would say something like that knowing full well it isn't true just to cause harm.
That said, I do actually agree with your basic principle that many "politically correct" people take the race issue way too seriously and, by getting offended inappropriately, actually perpetuate racism. But trying to call attention to it in this manner is adding fuel to the fire, not doing anything constructive.
There's no way that an home user can afford five nines internet access, so even if it isn't the authentication server end that's a problem, well, you're screwed anyway.
Do you really need to play "Assassins Creed 2" continuously with only 5 minutes of downtime every year? If so, I suspect that your Internet connection is the least of your issues.
Even three nines (eight hours of downtime per year) is more than reasonable for a normal home connection. That might even be good enough for a DRM server.
I'm at about four nines from Verizon FiOS (about 5 hours of downtime in the 3 years I've had the service).
... but I think you're missing the point. It doesn't matter what the total downtime over the course of a year is (unless you're lucky enough to get it all in one sitting). The problem is that with a less-than-perfect connection, that downtime can happen a second or two at a time. It was my understanding that even one second of downtime is enough to boot you out of the game and lose all your progress. By extrapolating from your figures, that happens more or less daily even at "five nines". I think a once per day random chance of program failure and loss of progress is going to alienate and upset all but the most casual of gamers, and I have no sympathy for a company that treats its paying customers like criminals.
In my home town, about 10+ years ago, they tried the same tactic to get rid of the teenagers that were eternally hanging out in the town square. Trouble was, the teenagers in question were mostly goth/vampire types and they actually liked the classical music. It still makes me laugh...
I want to point out that the laws are typically anti-poor not racist these days. We've grown past that i think. It doesn't help to misplace your anger.
You are right, the laws themselves are classist, not racist. However, the selective enforcement of these laws does tend to fall on racist lines quite often.
That's not even getting into the fact that our class structure itself is still racist (although that is slowly changing, we're totally not there yet).
Obviously, the orientation of the USB cable is in a state of superposition until you make an observation, collapsing the quantum wave function to a single orientation, thus allowing it to fit....
Can we be sure? What seems random may not in fact be truly random. The flip of a coin is considered random, but if you could account for all the variables with enough precision; angle of the coin, angle of the thumb, force of the flip, distance to the floor, etc, you could likely predict each and every toss.
Exactly. As a poetic friend of mine puts it, "There's no such thing as random, even dice have a past."
Rather than being random it could be that it's just more complex than we know, or that we can't determine the variables with enough accuracy. What is the exact value of PI?
The exact value of pi is actually that irrational number that people like to waste supercomputer time on calculating to millions of decimal places, but a calculation of pi to such extreme precision is useless for any practical purpose. You're on the right track but you're asking the wrong question. The catch is that circles are purely a mathematical abstraction, not a real thing. In the real physical world, circles don't exist. The closest we could come is a bajillion-sided polygon where each side is one Planck Unit long.
I hear electronics also. TVs and monitors make a high-pitched whine that I can tune out if there's other noise going on, but can actually get to be painful if someone has left their TV on displaying nothing in a quiet room.
On Naboo with JarJar. George Lucas needs to outdo his last Christmas Special.
I thought that's what fighting Yoda was.
Hey! I thought that seeing Yoda fight in a light-saber duel (presumably throwing his own body around with force-telekinesis) was one of the only good moments in the otherwise unspeakably horrible prequel trilogy. Don't take that away from me!
At its heart the issue really is that some people like guns and want them to be legal, and some people don't like guns and want them to be illegal. In America for various reasons, some valid and some invalid, most people want them to be legal.
I don't actually like guns but I still very much want them to be legal. As long as guns physically exist, bad people will be able to get their hands on them. Period. Can't put the genie back in the bottle no matter how many laws you pass. As long as bad people have physical access to guns, everyone else needs access to guns to be on equal footing to properly defend themselves. (Though I do agree that most people could use more training on how to properly use their guns, and I would be in favor of mandatory training like what Switzerland does.)
More police is also not an answer. The NRA has used this line so much that it's a cliche now, but that doesn't invalidate the point: "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away." Emergency services can take a life-threatening amount of time to respond. This is why we have privately owned fire extinguishers and first aid kits. Privately owned guns are the same sort of precaution.
Also, another true cliche: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." Even if you somehow manage to miraculously remove every gun on the planet and remove the knowledge of how to build them from our collective consciousness, people will go right on killing each other with knives and rocks and whatever else happens to be handy at the time. In a world without guns, wheelchair granny cannot defend herself against a thug with a baseball bat. Guns just level the playing field a bit.
The thing that bugs me the most about this issue though (at least in America) is that the liberals, who I usually side with come voting day, are on the side of disarmament. When it comes to electing politicians, why do I have to choose between civil rights and gun ownership? I see private gun ownership as a fundamental civil rights issue. I contribute to the ACLU and the NRA, and I don't understand why more "liberals" don't see it the same way.
The problem is there is no such thing as "proper spelling and grammar". By who's authority is it "proper"? The dictionary can't even produce self-consistency, let alone some sort of overall fundamental logical sense.
Fundamentally, I see nothing wrong with your string of l33t-speak (or text-speak as the kids are calling it now) as long as its meaning is unambiguous.
If "irregardless" makes you wince, how do you feel about flammable/inflammable? Also, will "irregardless" suddenly be acceptable ~5-10 years from now when it makes its way into an "official" printed dictionary like Webster's? Irregardless doesn't cause confusion, because the only people that don't understand its definition (synonym for "regardless", despite apparent root structure) are grammar nazis who refuse to learn.
Evolution is, by definition, made of aberrations.
As I said in my original post, I am a recovering former grammar nazi. I understand, to some extent, where you are coming from. They key realization for me was that an "error" isn't really an "error" unless it actually prevents communication from occurring.
I love my language too. "If you love something, set it free." If you dig in your heels and stick to "proper" spelling and grammar, you will rapidly find yourself unable to communicate with the rest of us.
P.S. At least I think that's irony. Every time I think I've got it down, someone shows me a new rule for what is or isn't irony. My apologies to the grammar Nazis in advance if I have it wrong.
As a recovering former grammar nazi, I would just like to say:
FUCK THE DICTIONARY!
Thanks to popular (mis)use, ironic now has multiple definitions, irregardless of what the dictionary might say.
Yeah grammar nazis, I just said "irregardless". Based on common usage, it is simply a synonym for "regardless". It's here to stay, you might as well get used to it. And I put periods outside of quotation marks and parentheses when it makes logical sense to do so (blame math/programming for that one if you must have a scapegoat). And cellphone is one word. And I can start a sentence with "and" if I want to.:P
Really, as long as communication occurs, what's the big deal? Why religiously stick to arbitrary rules of grammar/spelling/usage? Webster is not the final authority on what is or isn't valid english communication. (Actual real-world usage is.) Our language is constantly evolving, why can't you evolve along with it?
...or a broken/sticky/inaccurate fuel gauge. It's happened to me more than once, on different cars no less. Don't see how that can fairly be called incompetence.
I once even had a car run out of gas as I was pulling into the gas station, and I was able to coast up to the pump. Now that's lucky.
Slashdot Mirror
"Soul Food" is the politically correct label for African-American food. Think fried chicken & waffles, collard greens, okra, grits, chitluns... Basically southern food that was traditionally popular with the less economically-advantaged people in the south.
...because it was only a week or two ago. Depending on the day, they are worth between $1.55 to $1.85 a pound at my local scrap recycling company. They pay for plastic & glass too (even non-redemption glass is worth half a cent per pound). It was my understanding that this was the norm (at least in the U.S.). Where is it that you have to pay to recycle? What gave you the impression that you could no longer recycle aluminum cans by the pound for money?
Since we repealed "don't ask don't tell," The Playboy bunnies won't be 100% effective at least.
...and that's what the twinks are for...
I would question whether anyone with tattoos actually is any kind of geek, especially a math or science geek. We're supposed to be logical and have superior reasoning abilities, and there's absolutely nothing logical or reasonable about getting ink permanently injected into your skin.
There's nothing logical or reasonable about making your toaster run linux either, but it's considered a mark of true geekdom. Not all geeks have to be Vulcans. I think getting a tattoo of physics equations or a perl script or whatever to be incredibly geeky.
If you want art, get it on paper or canvas so you can pass it down to your descendants, not something that's destined to die when you do and that you can never sell or easily get rid of.
You can pass down your tattoo to your descendants... Just leave instructions in your will to be skinned and have your hide turned into a nice human-leather wall-hanging. (There's also photos & memories if you're squeamish).
Tattooing is a fad that comes and goes over the years; it was popular among the flappers in the 1920s and popular among WWII and Korean War soldiers. Today's tattoo fad comes to us courtesy of the American Prison Syetem, just like that other retarded fad, the pants halfway down with boxers showing.
Now tell these guys to GOML with their illogical fad following. Here's a hint for them -- you're never cool when you're trying to be. If you have tattoos, you might not belong at slashdot.
I know you're an old-timer, but tattoos aren't just for felons and soldiers anymore. They have actually achieved pretty wide mainstream acceptance. Kind of like how computers aren't just for geeks anymore.
Now, personally, I know I'm too fickle to commit to something that permanent on my body. But if other geeks want to decorate their skin with some geek-tribe symbols, I totally approve.
P.S. Discrimination for employment (or anything else) based on the existence of a tattoo should be punished as harshly as discrimination based on race, hair color, or sexual orientation. (However, an employer should be free to set a policy that tattoos must be covered while in uniform, as long as that policy is applied equally).
From what I've heard, The Netherlands seems like one of the sanest countries around. How necessary is it to speak Dutch to live there? Could an english-speaking american ex-pat get by ok?
I don't want to leave my home country but if it keeps marching toward Christian Police State I would like a backup plan.
I dislike the Fisher Price look of default XP, so I disable all the visual effects ("set to best performance") so it ends up looking a lot like '95, but I do use the XP start menu. I also enable the quick launch but take everything out of it except for the "show desktop" button.
And my favorite screensaver is still "Mystify", which dates back to Windows 3.x or possibly even further...
Hi there. I know you're probably a troll, but I'm going to respond to you as if you were serious.
Please note I am a professionally trained chef.
The practice of "resting" meat is important. If you cut into a steak that's hot off the grill, you will see a whole bunch of liquid run out and make a pool on your plate. Think of this as a pool of flavor that you just drained out of your steak. If you give it a few minutes to cool down a little and let the fat congeal, it won't go running out, and you will experience all the intended fatty goodness in every bite.
P.S. If your steak is actually *cold*, then yes somebody is doing something wrong.
So tell her to take a train(s) to somewhere that still has functioning air travel. Or get on a boat.
I once accidentally breathed in a very small amount of chlorine gas.
I was coughing my lungs up for weeks.
This gave some very intimate appreciation of the horrors of the gas attacks in the trenches.
I once had the same effect after accidentally inhaling a face-full of balsamic vinegar steam. Not fun. Worst thing I've ever had in my lungs (even worse than pepper spray). Was coughing and short of breath for weeks.
Exactly, dehumanizing the enemy is a necessary part of war if your soldiers aren't sociopaths (and the US military is fairly good at weeding those out).
Mo, the US military has almost nothing else. How, the fuck do you think they keep managing to find scum to send all around the world fucking America in the ass?
Keep in mind, the US military hasn't been used for anything except fucking the world for the sake of a few very rich sociopaths since world war 2. So given that, your assertion that the members of the US military are anything but sociopathic traitors is batshit insane. If they had a scrap of integrity they would have killed themselves long before obeying criminal, treasonous orders to fuck their country.
Seriously, try thinking not just spouting the idiotic militaristic propaganda you've been spoonfed.
I agree with you that in recent decades the U.S. military has mostly been used as a beatstick to protect the interests of a small handful of wealthy sociopathic elite. However, most of the soldiers aren't bad people. They are mostly ignorant, uneducated people who truly believe the lie that they are fighting the good fight and doing what needs to be done. It's not that they lack integrity, they genuinely don't know that what they are doing is traitorous to their country and their planet. Only a small handful at the very top qualify as "sociopathic traitors".
I can't think of anything that's morally wrong that doesn't cause harm. Did I read the wrong FA?
I was beginning to wonder if I had a magnet on my head because I can't think of anything morally wrong that doesn't cause harm either. Glad to know I'm not the only one that thinks this way.
I suspect religion may be the real culprit here, because that's the only place I can think of where things that cause no actual harm are called morally wrong.
On that note, did we just stumble across the area of the brain responsible for religion/magical thinking? Can many of the world's problems be solved with mandatory magnetic hats?
You also said:
Adultery is immoral (and harmful)
I contend that is not necessarily always the case. Open relationships can and do work. The main practical problem with adultery is the dishonesty that typically surrounds it, and that indeed causes harm, which in that case makes it immoral, but adultery doesn't necessarily have to be dishonest or harmful.
So you're saying something that you don't actually believe just to upset the people who take you seriously? Seems like some sort of weird, desperate, misguided grab for the wrong kind of attention. Or is it just pure malice, spreading negative emotions like nails on the freeway?
I would actually have more respect for a misguided racist individual who truly believes in "nigger grease" than for someone who would say something like that knowing full well it isn't true just to cause harm.
That said, I do actually agree with your basic principle that many "politically correct" people take the race issue way too seriously and, by getting offended inappropriately, actually perpetuate racism. But trying to call attention to it in this manner is adding fuel to the fire, not doing anything constructive.
There's no way that an home user can afford five nines internet access, so even if it isn't the authentication server end that's a problem, well, you're screwed anyway.
Do you really need to play "Assassins Creed 2" continuously with only 5 minutes of downtime every year? If so, I suspect that your Internet connection is the least of your issues.
Even three nines (eight hours of downtime per year) is more than reasonable for a normal home connection. That might even be good enough for a DRM server.
I'm at about four nines from Verizon FiOS (about 5 hours of downtime in the 3 years I've had the service).
... but I think you're missing the point. It doesn't matter what the total downtime over the course of a year is (unless you're lucky enough to get it all in one sitting). The problem is that with a less-than-perfect connection, that downtime can happen a second or two at a time. It was my understanding that even one second of downtime is enough to boot you out of the game and lose all your progress. By extrapolating from your figures, that happens more or less daily even at "five nines". I think a once per day random chance of program failure and loss of progress is going to alienate and upset all but the most casual of gamers, and I have no sympathy for a company that treats its paying customers like criminals.
In my home town, about 10+ years ago, they tried the same tactic to get rid of the teenagers that were eternally hanging out in the town square. Trouble was, the teenagers in question were mostly goth/vampire types and they actually liked the classical music. It still makes me laugh...
I want to point out that the laws are typically anti-poor not racist these days. We've grown past that i think. It doesn't help to misplace your anger.
You are right, the laws themselves are classist, not racist. However, the selective enforcement of these laws does tend to fall on racist lines quite often.
That's not even getting into the fact that our class structure itself is still racist (although that is slowly changing, we're totally not there yet).
Obviously, the orientation of the USB cable is in a state of superposition until you make an observation, collapsing the quantum wave function to a single orientation, thus allowing it to fit....
At the atomic level there's a lot of randomness.
Can we be sure? What seems random may not in fact be truly random. The flip of a coin is considered random, but if you could account for all the variables with enough precision; angle of the coin, angle of the thumb, force of the flip, distance to the floor, etc, you could likely predict each and every toss.
Exactly. As a poetic friend of mine puts it, "There's no such thing as random, even dice have a past."
Rather than being random it could be that it's just more complex than we know, or that we can't determine the variables with enough accuracy. What is the exact value of PI?
The exact value of pi is actually that irrational number that people like to waste supercomputer time on calculating to millions of decimal places, but a calculation of pi to such extreme precision is useless for any practical purpose. You're on the right track but you're asking the wrong question. The catch is that circles are purely a mathematical abstraction, not a real thing. In the real physical world, circles don't exist. The closest we could come is a bajillion-sided polygon where each side is one Planck Unit long.
You forgot about the quadriplegics and paraplegics. We need to chop everyone's limbs off too.
You forgot about the deceased..... Should we go with nukes or bioweapons?
Close to zero, I would say, since he now has a girlfriend.
If I had mod points right now you would get a "Funny" for that.
If I had a nickel for every gay man with a girlfriend or wife.....
I hear electronics also. TVs and monitors make a high-pitched whine that I can tune out if there's other noise going on, but can actually get to be painful if someone has left their TV on displaying nothing in a quiet room.
I thought that's what fighting Yoda was.
Hey! I thought that seeing Yoda fight in a light-saber duel (presumably throwing his own body around with force-telekinesis) was one of the only good moments in the otherwise unspeakably horrible prequel trilogy. Don't take that away from me!
At its heart the issue really is that some people like guns and want them to be legal, and some people don't like guns and want them to be illegal. In America for various reasons, some valid and some invalid, most people want them to be legal.
I don't actually like guns but I still very much want them to be legal. As long as guns physically exist, bad people will be able to get their hands on them. Period. Can't put the genie back in the bottle no matter how many laws you pass. As long as bad people have physical access to guns, everyone else needs access to guns to be on equal footing to properly defend themselves. (Though I do agree that most people could use more training on how to properly use their guns, and I would be in favor of mandatory training like what Switzerland does.)
More police is also not an answer. The NRA has used this line so much that it's a cliche now, but that doesn't invalidate the point: "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away." Emergency services can take a life-threatening amount of time to respond. This is why we have privately owned fire extinguishers and first aid kits. Privately owned guns are the same sort of precaution.
Also, another true cliche: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." Even if you somehow manage to miraculously remove every gun on the planet and remove the knowledge of how to build them from our collective consciousness, people will go right on killing each other with knives and rocks and whatever else happens to be handy at the time. In a world without guns, wheelchair granny cannot defend herself against a thug with a baseball bat. Guns just level the playing field a bit.
The thing that bugs me the most about this issue though (at least in America) is that the liberals, who I usually side with come voting day, are on the side of disarmament. When it comes to electing politicians, why do I have to choose between civil rights and gun ownership? I see private gun ownership as a fundamental civil rights issue. I contribute to the ACLU and the NRA, and I don't understand why more "liberals" don't see it the same way.
The problem is there is no such thing as "proper spelling and grammar". By who's authority is it "proper"? The dictionary can't even produce self-consistency, let alone some sort of overall fundamental logical sense.
Fundamentally, I see nothing wrong with your string of l33t-speak (or text-speak as the kids are calling it now) as long as its meaning is unambiguous.
If "irregardless" makes you wince, how do you feel about flammable/inflammable? Also, will "irregardless" suddenly be acceptable ~5-10 years from now when it makes its way into an "official" printed dictionary like Webster's? Irregardless doesn't cause confusion, because the only people that don't understand its definition (synonym for "regardless", despite apparent root structure) are grammar nazis who refuse to learn.
Evolution is, by definition, made of aberrations.
As I said in my original post, I am a recovering former grammar nazi. I understand, to some extent, where you are coming from. They key realization for me was that an "error" isn't really an "error" unless it actually prevents communication from occurring.
I love my language too. "If you love something, set it free." If you dig in your heels and stick to "proper" spelling and grammar, you will rapidly find yourself unable to communicate with the rest of us.
P.S. At least I think that's irony. Every time I think I've got it down, someone shows me a new rule for what is or isn't irony. My apologies to the grammar Nazis in advance if I have it wrong.
As a recovering former grammar nazi, I would just like to say:
FUCK THE DICTIONARY!
Thanks to popular (mis)use, ironic now has multiple definitions, irregardless of what the dictionary might say.
Yeah grammar nazis, I just said "irregardless". Based on common usage, it is simply a synonym for "regardless". It's here to stay, you might as well get used to it. And I put periods outside of quotation marks and parentheses when it makes logical sense to do so (blame math/programming for that one if you must have a scapegoat). And cellphone is one word. And I can start a sentence with "and" if I want to. :P
Really, as long as communication occurs, what's the big deal? Why religiously stick to arbitrary rules of grammar/spelling/usage? Webster is not the final authority on what is or isn't valid english communication. (Actual real-world usage is.) Our language is constantly evolving, why can't you evolve along with it?
Very good point. I've run out of gas twice
Once is unlucky. Twice is incompetent.
...or a broken/sticky/inaccurate fuel gauge. It's happened to me more than once, on different cars no less. Don't see how that can fairly be called incompetence.
I once even had a car run out of gas as I was pulling into the gas station, and I was able to coast up to the pump. Now that's lucky.