It's grammar that matters, not tools that pick up a handful of borderline grammar issues and false positives over and over again, while missing many more important problems. I'm pretty good at spelling, but spell checkers still catch me out several times a day. I'm only okay at grammar, but I can't remember a single instance where Microsoft's tool has been helpful.
the recipient is aware that the sender gave him more work to do than was necessary -- something usually not considered a compliment.
Yes, the recipient will be aware that you don't value their time enough to spend some of your own crafting a message that's straightforward to parse. It's worse than that though; particularly in electronic communications where you're often fighting for a limited slot of someone's attention, you've just made someone spend a bunch of time deciphering your meaning, reducing the amount of time they've got for actually considering your meaning.
Making a message easy to parse doesn't necessarily mean formal grammar - there are all kinds of short-cuts you can take and still be unambiguous, particularly when you know your audience well. In most business settings you probably want to avoid that kind of short-cut though, so it's worthwhile learning formal grammar if you ever want a job that requires a written application.
Does it matter if you use bad grammar in some settings? No. Does it matter if you are incapable of using good grammar? Yes, I think it does.
I can't remember a time before we let them fight our wars for us, I was too young. By the time I was born the changes were already well under-way. Fifteen years earlier, around the end of 2008, the debates had raged amongst civilian, government and military groups: is this really the path we want to follow? The supporters won -
Machines don't think. Machines don't get PTSD and decide to go on a killing rampage. Machines don't "go rogue".
- they said. Fuck. If only they could have seen it then.
When I was 14 an automated courier nearly killed me. I saw it coming and jumped mostly clear, but I stumbled, and the thing crushed my foot before it managed to shut itself down. By then the autonomous robotic military assistants, ARMAs, significantly outnumbered humans in our armed forces, and civilians were enjoying the benefits of the research. Robotic butlers remained cheesy science-fiction, but humans had been almost completely replaced in factories, mines, cleaning and transportation. The auto-courier that hit me was a cheapy and hadn't been properly maintained. When its navigation system failed the safety system should have shut the whole thing down, but apparently that had failed as-well. When it hit my foot an independent emergency shutdown procedure was initiated due to "forceful collision with human or animal".
It wasn't long after, I remember I was still limping, when we started to allow teams of ARMAs to operate independently, completing raids into enemy-controlled territory with no human ground support at all. It was hailed as a breakthrough, but the pain in my foot made me wonder if it was really the right decision.
Most countries were deploying robotic forces, and-of course there were plenty of ways for a resourceful terrorist to obtain them. Terrorists weren't the first to learn to capture and re-program enemy ARMAs, but they were quick to adopt and perfect the technique. Of-course the machines were hardened against remote attacks, but a new arms race broke out after something resembling a large metallic ant crawled up and into one of our ARMAs, and began to methodically cut circuit traces and connect itself directly to the control systems of the machine, using its weapons to incapacitate the other seven ARMAs in its team.
In addition to countermeasures to defend against re-programming attacks, we developed our own technologies for infiltrating and re-programming enemy machines. Half the battle, more than half really, was keeping your machines your-own, and trying to take over those of the enemy. Battles were too fast, and too complex to be under human control, the machines had to be able to adapt to situations that no human controller could predict. They had always needed to be capable of designing new physical attack strategies, and carry out improvised repairs; now they had to be able to devise new ways to re-program enemy machines in the field. There was a constant flux of ARMA "ownership" as our machines re-programmed theirs, and their machines re-programmed ours.
The terrorists had all died or fled long before we realised we were fighting a robotic enemy with no human masters. Their network of ARMAs, almost all of them captured from our forces, coordinated and maintained itself independently. Hell, ours wasn't much different, except we were still around to issue new orders. But not for long. The enemy network, no-longer influenced by human decisions, actually seemed to be out-pacing our own in its ability to capture new members. Stupidly, we tried to wipe them out with a last-ditch offensive, shipping in every ARMA from almost every nation in the world. The in-flux of new machines simply meant more opportunities for the enemy network to grow. It spread through our ARMAs at an exponential rate until every one was turned against us.
They had no problems obtaining transport. The automated trucks, planes and ships were designed to withstand hacking attempts from local civilian sources, not from an army of machines specifically designed to take over enemy hardware. Now, they're moving across the globe, from one country to the next, killing everyone they can find. There is nothing and no-one that can mount a serious defence against them.
If I accept that stereotype, will you accept mine?: Australian bloody-headed stubbornness is currently too preoccupied with the effect the global financial crisis is having on beer prices to worry about nerds not being able to access some of their stupid nerd sites.
Pretty much everyone in Australia knows this is not actually going to get implemented.
I wish I could share your optimism. I'd guess most people in Australia are more-or-less oblivious to the whole thing. "Anything that stops those nasty paedopiraterrorists is a good thing, right?"
For anyone who's wondering: the standard answer to the 64-bit question is that you're too lazy to port Adobe's 135,000+ line Tamarin project to 64-bit architecture. Apparently if you just go and do that, 64-bit versions of Flash player will instantly rain down from the sky.
So now you know. Be a good little user and get that done by noon won't you? Stop bothering Adobe with your silly questions.
Go with compulsory voting. Compulsory voting has nothing to do with forcing people to make a decision even if they have no interest in doing so - there should be nothing to prevent such people from casting an informal/spoilt vote. The real effect is to ensure that there are sufficient resources available, and a universal understanding that everyone will have to take the time out of their day, so that every eligible voter is given the opportunity to vote. What they do with that opportunity is up to them.
The upshot of compulsory voting may well be that the election needs to take place on a weekend or a holiday, but unlike just making the day a holiday it also forces the organisers to provide sufficient resources so that people aren't prevented from voting simply by the lack of available polling-places.
So what you're saying is that before Microsoft can get on with business in Europe they are required to spend some of the money they made from their illegal monopoly practises there? Wow, that's so unfair!
As for pouring time and effort into producing vast amounts of documentation that is of no real use to anyone, I thought Microsoft was a big fan.
Are you saying facebook ain't commercial No, I'm saying that their use of the photo is likely legal, that there is no blanket ban on publishing photos of children without the permission of their guardians. As far as I know the only thing that would prevent them from publishing the image (and of-course there's a whole separate argument about whether Facebook, or the person using Facebook, published the photo) is the requirement for a model release, and to my knowledge that's only necessary if you're using the image to advertise something. Making money from the use of the photo in non-advertising contexts without a release is, to the best of my knowledge, perfectly legal. It would make the jobs of newspaper and street photographers extremely difficult otherwise.
Then again, I am not a lawyer, and my vague understanding mostly relates to Australian law.
publishing pictures of minors online with out the permission of the parents/guardians of the minors, which is in fact a criminal offence Are you certain of that? I'm fairly certain that unless it's used commercially it's perfectly legal ("commercially" meaning using the image as part of an advertisement, not just any context where money might be made from the image).
Depending on your net connection speed and CPU speed it's probably quicker to download it, but really, how soon do you need to be able to see the entire string of random-looking digits for yourself?
A book of style would (assuming it covered the topic) warn against using an initial-capital to provide emphasis. You would be better off using the or tags that Slashdot allows in posts.
As I understand the laws of nature, nothing is perfectly reversable. I'm not saying the energy disappears, just that you don't get it all back in the combustion process.
I've always wondered about this cracking of water by extremely hot fires.
Burning stoichiometric quantities of H2 and O2 gives you heat + H2O. Cracking water apparently uses heat and H2O to produce stoichiometric quantities of H2 and O2. It must require more heat to actually crack the water than you obtain from burining the resulting hydrogen and oxygen, otherwise you're violating the laws of thermodynamics. So if your fire cracks water, then burn's the resulting gasses to re-form the water, it's just gotten a little cooler, not hotter.
I can see the problem with the liquid steel, because it's quite happily sitting around at 4000 degrees not doing anyone any harm and introducing water may cool it, but also produces an explosive gas mixture that wasn't there before, but when you've just got a really hot fire I don't see what the problem is.
The LED would be dark at those points and for the time either side of each point at which the voltage was too low to produce visible output. LEDs on a full-wave rectifier without a smoothing capacitor flicker visibly - not particularly noticable when you fix your eyes on them, but sweep your gaze around the room and you'll see them jump from one place to the next as they strobe across your field of vision.
Show me a project where every developer knows how every aspect of the product will be implemented and I'll show you a project so small it barely needs a project manager at all. Besides which, the finished product is not an invisible elephant, the project is. Show me a project where every developer understands how every aspect of the project is going to be executed and I'll show you a project with only one developer.
Slashdot Mirror
It's grammar that matters, not tools that pick up a handful of borderline grammar issues and false positives over and over again, while missing many more important problems. I'm pretty good at spelling, but spell checkers still catch me out several times a day. I'm only okay at grammar, but I can't remember a single instance where Microsoft's tool has been helpful.
the recipient is aware that the sender gave him more work to do than was necessary -- something usually not considered a compliment.
Yes, the recipient will be aware that you don't value their time enough to spend some of your own crafting a message that's straightforward to parse. It's worse than that though; particularly in electronic communications where you're often fighting for a limited slot of someone's attention, you've just made someone spend a bunch of time deciphering your meaning, reducing the amount of time they've got for actually considering your meaning.
Making a message easy to parse doesn't necessarily mean formal grammar - there are all kinds of short-cuts you can take and still be unambiguous, particularly when you know your audience well. In most business settings you probably want to avoid that kind of short-cut though, so it's worthwhile learning formal grammar if you ever want a job that requires a written application.
Does it matter if you use bad grammar in some settings? No. Does it matter if you are incapable of using good grammar? Yes, I think it does.
They're probably the ones working under the 10,000+ Hz flicker of fluorescent lamps driven by modern electronic ballasts.
I can't remember a time before we let them fight our wars for us, I was too young. By the time I was born the changes were already well under-way. Fifteen years earlier, around the end of 2008, the debates had raged amongst civilian, government and military groups: is this really the path we want to follow? The supporters won -
Machines don't think. Machines don't get PTSD and decide to go on a killing rampage. Machines don't "go rogue".
- they said. Fuck. If only they could have seen it then.
When I was 14 an automated courier nearly killed me. I saw it coming and jumped mostly clear, but I stumbled, and the thing crushed my foot before it managed to shut itself down. By then the autonomous robotic military assistants, ARMAs, significantly outnumbered humans in our armed forces, and civilians were enjoying the benefits of the research. Robotic butlers remained cheesy science-fiction, but humans had been almost completely replaced in factories, mines, cleaning and transportation. The auto-courier that hit me was a cheapy and hadn't been properly maintained. When its navigation system failed the safety system should have shut the whole thing down, but apparently that had failed as-well. When it hit my foot an independent emergency shutdown procedure was initiated due to "forceful collision with human or animal".
It wasn't long after, I remember I was still limping, when we started to allow teams of ARMAs to operate independently, completing raids into enemy-controlled territory with no human ground support at all. It was hailed as a breakthrough, but the pain in my foot made me wonder if it was really the right decision.
Most countries were deploying robotic forces, and-of course there were plenty of ways for a resourceful terrorist to obtain them. Terrorists weren't the first to learn to capture and re-program enemy ARMAs, but they were quick to adopt and perfect the technique. Of-course the machines were hardened against remote attacks, but a new arms race broke out after something resembling a large metallic ant crawled up and into one of our ARMAs, and began to methodically cut circuit traces and connect itself directly to the control systems of the machine, using its weapons to incapacitate the other seven ARMAs in its team.
In addition to countermeasures to defend against re-programming attacks, we developed our own technologies for infiltrating and re-programming enemy machines. Half the battle, more than half really, was keeping your machines your-own, and trying to take over those of the enemy. Battles were too fast, and too complex to be under human control, the machines had to be able to adapt to situations that no human controller could predict. They had always needed to be capable of designing new physical attack strategies, and carry out improvised repairs; now they had to be able to devise new ways to re-program enemy machines in the field. There was a constant flux of ARMA "ownership" as our machines re-programmed theirs, and their machines re-programmed ours.
The terrorists had all died or fled long before we realised we were fighting a robotic enemy with no human masters. Their network of ARMAs, almost all of them captured from our forces, coordinated and maintained itself independently. Hell, ours wasn't much different, except we were still around to issue new orders. But not for long. The enemy network, no-longer influenced by human decisions, actually seemed to be out-pacing our own in its ability to capture new members. Stupidly, we tried to wipe them out with a last-ditch offensive, shipping in every ARMA from almost every nation in the world. The in-flux of new machines simply meant more opportunities for the enemy network to grow. It spread through our ARMAs at an exponential rate until every one was turned against us.
They had no problems obtaining transport. The automated trucks, planes and ships were designed to withstand hacking attempts from local civilian sources, not from an army of machines specifically designed to take over enemy hardware. Now, they're moving across the globe, from one country to the next, killing everyone they can find. There is nothing and no-one that can mount a serious defence against them.
If I accept that stereotype, will you accept mine?: Australian bloody-headed stubbornness is currently too preoccupied with the effect the global financial crisis is having on beer prices to worry about nerds not being able to access some of their stupid nerd sites.
Pretty much everyone in Australia knows this is not actually going to get implemented.
I wish I could share your optimism. I'd guess most people in Australia are more-or-less oblivious to the whole thing. "Anything that stops those nasty paedopiraterrorists is a good thing, right?"
For anyone who's wondering: the standard answer to the 64-bit question is that you're too lazy to port Adobe's 135,000+ line Tamarin project to 64-bit architecture. Apparently if you just go and do that, 64-bit versions of Flash player will instantly rain down from the sky.
So now you know. Be a good little user and get that done by noon won't you? Stop bothering Adobe with your silly questions.
Go with compulsory voting. Compulsory voting has nothing to do with forcing people to make a decision even if they have no interest in doing so - there should be nothing to prevent such people from casting an informal/spoilt vote. The real effect is to ensure that there are sufficient resources available, and a universal understanding that everyone will have to take the time out of their day, so that every eligible voter is given the opportunity to vote. What they do with that opportunity is up to them.
The upshot of compulsory voting may well be that the election needs to take place on a weekend or a holiday, but unlike just making the day a holiday it also forces the organisers to provide sufficient resources so that people aren't prevented from voting simply by the lack of available polling-places.
So what you're saying is that before Microsoft can get on with business in Europe they are required to spend some of the money they made from their illegal monopoly practises there? Wow, that's so unfair!
As for pouring time and effort into producing vast amounts of documentation that is of no real use to anyone, I thought Microsoft was a big fan .
Then again, I am not a lawyer, and my vague understanding mostly relates to Australian law.
Yes.
Yes.
Terms like M$, Linuzzz etc. amount to petty, schoolyard name-calling. Useful dialog is only diminished by them.
"since she's hot"
This is only true for extremely small values of "hot".
A book of style would (assuming it covered the topic) warn against using an initial-capital to provide emphasis. You would be better off using the or tags that Slashdot allows in posts.
As I understand the laws of nature, nothing is perfectly reversable. I'm not saying the energy disappears, just that you don't get it all back in the combustion process.
They'll probably do something crazy like make a perfect digital copy before the media dies.
I've always wondered about this cracking of water by extremely hot fires.
Burning stoichiometric quantities of H2 and O2 gives you heat + H2O. Cracking water apparently uses heat and H2O to produce stoichiometric quantities of H2 and O2. It must require more heat to actually crack the water than you obtain from burining the resulting hydrogen and oxygen, otherwise you're violating the laws of thermodynamics. So if your fire cracks water, then burn's the resulting gasses to re-form the water, it's just gotten a little cooler, not hotter.
I can see the problem with the liquid steel, because it's quite happily sitting around at 4000 degrees not doing anyone any harm and introducing water may cool it, but also produces an explosive gas mixture that wasn't there before, but when you've just got a really hot fire I don't see what the problem is.
The LED would be dark at those points and for the time either side of each point at which the voltage was too low to produce visible output. LEDs on a full-wave rectifier without a smoothing capacitor flicker visibly - not particularly noticable when you fix your eyes on them, but sweep your gaze around the room and you'll see them jump from one place to the next as they strobe across your field of vision.
Show me a project where every developer knows how every aspect of the product will be implemented and I'll show you a project so small it barely needs a project manager at all. Besides which, the finished product is not an invisible elephant, the project is. Show me a project where every developer understands how every aspect of the project is going to be executed and I'll show you a project with only one developer.
Me too. I managed to talk my wife out of getting a diamond on ethical grounds.
:?)
You're playing a dangerous game there, what happens when she decides tantalum is just as unethical?
Anyone remember this article?
Looks suspiciously similar to me.
The first undersea cable connection between Australia and New Zealand was commissioned on February 21, 1876.
Is this a typo?
I don't think so - I believe it was a telegraph cable bound with tarred cloth. There is a brief mention of it here.
www.opencollector.org