I assume by "missing serial commas" you refer to the absence of a comma before the conjunction in phrases like "archive, copy, print or distribute".
Just to let you know that these are optional and style dependent. In general, American styles include them, whereas other styles exclude them: But of course, an American can just as easily exclude them if they prefer, and anyone else can just as easily include them. It's not wrong, it's just different.
Why is this relevant? Microsoft doesn't sell computers. Apple do. It's no surprise that Apple-branded computers run Apple's OS. Microsoft-branded computers I'd fully expect to run a Microsoft OS. But... where can I get such a thing from?
Dell, OTOH, let me buy a laptop with either Intel Integrated Graphics, or an nVidia graphics card (even tho it's otherwise the same model!). Why shouldn't I think it reasonable to be able to buy a laptop with the operating system I prefer, too?
Not the sort of power I had in mind. I'm thinking more along the lines of people who profess to be Christian because it will help them to be elected into government. But even then "power" still doesn't give you a good idea of the word I mean... Fundamentalist Christian Neo-Conservative sorts.
In any case, every Catholic priest I've met who's discussed the topic, and all the Catholic teachers at my primary school, and all the leaders in the Catholic youth group I used to attend taught Christianity as I put it. The Baptists at the local Baptist Church I used to attend felt the same. The various religious-political groups that I've looked at who are motivated by doing the right thing rather than abusing power also teach stewardship.
I wouldn't say it's obvious that a browser would go to Slashdot after typing "/." in the address bar.
Wrong way. If there's a shortcut for going to slashdot, the obvious one is/. If someone told you there was a shortcut to going to slashdot built-in to Opera,/. in the address bar would be one of the first things you'd try (I hope!). Likewise, if someone told you there was a keyboard shorcut to activate the location bar, Ctrl+L would be high on your list of things to try.
But if someone told you your webbrowser had a hidden feature that caused it to quote from the opera Tristan and Isolde where would you begin?
I want a laptop I can buy in Australia with GNU/Linux pre-installed (or, at least, just-works fully compatible with linux: extended desktop, wireless, sound, bluetooth,...). If Dell does Linux, I can get that. But System 76 or Penguin or whoever can't or won't.
That's not an easter egg. Easter eggs are hidden features which are unrelated to the main task of the program. Usually they give credit to the team in a fun way.
At best, this is an undocumented shortcut. Lots of software has them.
(You can tell it wasn't hidden, because the obvious shortcut for "slashdot" is "/.". If it were hidden, you'd be doing something completely unlikely and suddenly and unexpectedly get to Slashdot, like pressing Ctrl+Alt+/, then Shift+Meta+., then double clicking on the "Help" menu item.)
I'm not christian. I'm pagan, and as a result I view nature as something other than being put here entirely for the human race to pillage and plunder.
No true Christian sees nature as something for the human race to pillage and plunder. In the Christian worldview, we are here as God's stewards, and it is very much our job to look after the world (e.g. Gen 2:15). Anyone who tells you otherwise selectively reads their bible to let them pretend to have power; but this is the complete opposite of everything that Christianity teaches. (Verses in the bible tell us we can use the earth and what it provides, and that it is there for our use, but it does not say we can abuse it.)
He also said that human adaptability to absence of light increases with time (this is right) and that if you remained 60 minutes in a dark room, you'd be adapted enough to be able to read a text on a paper. WTF??
Obviously adaptation is completed by an hour, but it depends on how dark the room is. If you're in a room about as dark as a cinema (and I'd consider that dark), then you'd easily be able to read, at least if your eyes are good enough. I can hardly imagine he meant pitch black.
Given the relative scarcity of larger bodies of water there, I did not realize that New Mexico had any pirates at all, let alone some in the legislature. Good work!
It's a relatively disused grammatical structure called the "subjunctive". The most common use of it in English these days really is when someone says "if I were king", where "were" doesn't actually agree in number with "I". Legislation tends to use a lot of the subjunctive, because (a) the rest of us don't, and legislation that was comprehensible would help us to obey it and (b) it has to do with things not presently being the case.
Also, pi = 4. Or maybe 3.2. The government has spoken, let it be written!
Completely different. Pi's definition can be independently confirmed. The definition of "planet" is just something a group of people decide. The IAU evidently can't be trusted to make the definition. Perhaps New Mexico's legislature will be better...
Of course it speaks volumes that the term "mebi" is almost 10 years old now and still hasn't taken hold.
Actually, if you run a GNU/Linux box and look at a lot of command-line utils, the abbreviations they use are certainly the standard. So for instance, the output of ifconfig on my computer currently reports, amongst others:
GNU and BSD command-line utils also generally provide both options to output values in non-standard (i.e. 1 KB = 1 024 bytes) and standard sizes (e.g. "ls -h" will give non-standard output, whereas "ls --si" (on GNU at least) will give standard output).
Similarly, I just bought a 4 GB USB flash drive, and it has a formatted capacity of 4 000 000 000 bytes. Debian's apt-get reports my download speed as being 13 kB/s.
So both aspects of the standard are in practical use.
As for what "most people" will do: They'll say whatever their computer says. And at least in metric countries, I suspect most people would be surprised if you told them they're wrong when they approximate 28 324 124 as 28 megabytes.
350 USD. Been well-known since, you know, January. They've even announced prices for the car and hackers kits (75 and 200 USD IIRC).
The lack of EDGE GPRS is an absolute dealbreaker.
This phone wasn't meant to be perfect for everyone. The iPhone doesn't do GPS, so I won't be buying it;[*] otoh a fast network connection is not something I really need on a screen that small. Other OpenMoko phones might be released if the Neo1973 does well enough that might be more suited to your needs.
[*] Not that I know when, or if, it'll be released out here in Australia. It's hard to know if we count as 'Europe', 'Asia', or 'WTF? You exist?!'.
Ah. I even checked up the dictionary for "sold" and it only gave variations of "to sell". As I say, there is no special relationship between (this sense of) "sold" and "soldier", although it's possible if you go far enough (common origin some five thousand years ago rather than borrowing).
I can therefore only assume "sold" is either particularly specialist terminology or not an English word, which explains my confusion:)
I do not know what "sold" is in this context. If you're referring to the word in the phrase "I sold my labor", then that's the past tense of "sell", it's no more special than "teach"->"taught" or even "walk"->"walked"... Certainly has no relationship to "solidus".
I don't mean to criticise *you* (not least because I don't know who you are!), but why is it such a bad thing for MS not to provide tools for Mac OS X, but there's nothing wrong with the fact that they don't provide anything for Red Hat.
I used to assume it was just because MS didn't compete with Mac OS X because of PPC hardware (according to some strained definition), but they did with GNU/Linux because it usually runs on the x86 platform, but even that strained argument no longer applies...
Only by definition. People using HTML or LaTeX are essentially "word processing by hand", particuly so if the intended destination is print, as it usually is with LaTeX and occasionally is for HTML (between the time I switched to Linux and learnt about LaTeX, HTML was basically my only option for doing school assignments; OpenOffice didn't exist yet).
And even "by definition" basically ignores Word Perfect's "show codes" feature. I doubt anyone uses it anymore, but the fact that it existed implies a use...
Sounds like a sure way to piss off the religious and atheists alike:]
Sigh. How many times must Slashdot be reminded that there is absolutely no incompatibility between religion and evolution! Specific religions may have particular feelings, but the largest organised religion, which accounts for one in six of the world's population, and which does turn to Genesis for some of its answers, has absolutely no feelings on the matter. (And in fact, I was taught exclusively evolution at a school run by these folk.)
I fail to see the difference between "this January" and "last January". Aren't both actually about January 2007?
The meaning of "next" and "last" is the point of frequent confusion. To some people, they refer to soonest or most recent event mentioned: This is usually what someone means when they say "turn left at the next lights".
But in reference to time, people often use the construction "next x" or "last x" to refer to the x of the preceding or following time period. So "next Tuesday" would mean "Tuesday of next week", "last January" would mean "January of last year". "This x" then refers to the x of the current time period, so "this Tuesday" and "this January" refer to the Tuesday or January of the current week or year, regardless of if they're in the future or the past.
Still others use "this x" to refer to the soonest x after today, and "next x" to refer to one after that.
Then there's also the "Tuesday week" construction, referring to second Tuesday after today. This is obviously the same as that last definition of "next x" in the case that x is a day of the week.
I think it's partially a regional and partially a personal variation. I'd just make sure your audience understands you if it's important, and I wouldn't be offended if they don't. Welcome to English!
I've been using Debian on my desktop for around two years now, and I've been using Debian Testing for all that time. Since I switched, I've heard that a few times, but have never understood why. Since 1998, I've used Gentoo, FreeBSD, Red Hat, Slackware, Ubuntu and Yellow Dog, and I've finally found a distro I'm happy to use; I've completely stopped looking.
Why is it that I should be scared of Testing? I've heard that a package can be unusable for a month, but I've never had that happen to me before. Why does Testing exist if it's so bad?
I think the idea that humans can only travel long distances over land should have been disproved by the population of Australia and the Pacific islands.
Australia and Oceania/the Pacific Islands are completely different. Australia has been populated for tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of years. It's usually accepted that the Aborigines came to Australia via a landbridge connecting the mainland to New Guinea. Another landbridge connected Victoria to Tasmania, allowing the Aborigines to get there without using boats at all.
Oceania/the Pacific Islands, including New Zealand, were colonised at a much later date (NZ, for instance, was populated only around 1000 years ago). Boats were used, but it was so much later that it provides no more evidence that people could first have colonised America using boats than the fact that Europeans eventually colonised America using boats does.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't look like a joke. Here it is in context. Inconceivable!
I assume by "missing serial commas" you refer to the absence of a comma before the conjunction in phrases like "archive, copy, print or distribute".
Just to let you know that these are optional and style dependent. In general, American styles include them, whereas other styles exclude them: But of course, an American can just as easily exclude them if they prefer, and anyone else can just as easily include them. It's not wrong, it's just different.
Why is this relevant? Microsoft doesn't sell computers. Apple do. It's no surprise that Apple-branded computers run Apple's OS. Microsoft-branded computers I'd fully expect to run a Microsoft OS. But ... where can I get such a thing from?
Dell, OTOH, let me buy a laptop with either Intel Integrated Graphics, or an nVidia graphics card (even tho it's otherwise the same model!). Why shouldn't I think it reasonable to be able to buy a laptop with the operating system I prefer, too?
Not the sort of power I had in mind. I'm thinking more along the lines of people who profess to be Christian because it will help them to be elected into government. But even then "power" still doesn't give you a good idea of the word I mean... Fundamentalist Christian Neo-Conservative sorts.
In any case, every Catholic priest I've met who's discussed the topic, and all the Catholic teachers at my primary school, and all the leaders in the Catholic youth group I used to attend taught Christianity as I put it. The Baptists at the local Baptist Church I used to attend felt the same. The various religious-political groups that I've looked at who are motivated by doing the right thing rather than abusing power also teach stewardship.
I wouldn't say it's obvious that a browser would go to Slashdot after typing "/." in the address bar.
/. If someone told you there was a shortcut to going to slashdot built-in to Opera, /. in the address bar would be one of the first things you'd try (I hope!). Likewise, if someone told you there was a keyboard shorcut to activate the location bar, Ctrl+L would be high on your list of things to try.
Wrong way. If there's a shortcut for going to slashdot, the obvious one is
But if someone told you your webbrowser had a hidden feature that caused it to quote from the opera Tristan and Isolde where would you begin?
Damn, time to change the keybindings on my apps to something less obvious.
:)
You use Emacs to run Opera?
I want a laptop I can buy in Australia with GNU/Linux pre-installed (or, at least, just-works fully compatible with linux: extended desktop, wireless, sound, bluetooth, ...). If Dell does Linux, I can get that. But System 76 or Penguin or whoever can't or won't.
Well done to your, little sister.
That's not an easter egg. Easter eggs are hidden features which are unrelated to the main task of the program. Usually they give credit to the team in a fun way.
At best, this is an undocumented shortcut. Lots of software has them.
(You can tell it wasn't hidden, because the obvious shortcut for "slashdot" is "/.". If it were hidden, you'd be doing something completely unlikely and suddenly and unexpectedly get to Slashdot, like pressing Ctrl+Alt+/, then Shift+Meta+., then double clicking on the "Help" menu item.)
I'm not christian. I'm pagan, and as a result I view nature as something other than being put here entirely for the human race to pillage and plunder.
No true Christian sees nature as something for the human race to pillage and plunder. In the Christian worldview, we are here as God's stewards, and it is very much our job to look after the world (e.g. Gen 2:15). Anyone who tells you otherwise selectively reads their bible to let them pretend to have power; but this is the complete opposite of everything that Christianity teaches. (Verses in the bible tell us we can use the earth and what it provides, and that it is there for our use, but it does not say we can abuse it.)
He also said that human adaptability to absence of light increases with time (this is right) and that if you remained 60 minutes in a dark room, you'd be adapted enough to be able to read a text on a paper. WTF??
Obviously adaptation is completed by an hour, but it depends on how dark the room is. If you're in a room about as dark as a cinema (and I'd consider that dark), then you'd easily be able to read, at least if your eyes are good enough. I can hardly imagine he meant pitch black.
(But everything else he said is crap.)
Given the relative scarcity of larger bodies of water there, I did not realize that New Mexico had any pirates at all, let alone some in the legislature. Good work!
It's a relatively disused grammatical structure called the "subjunctive". The most common use of it in English these days really is when someone says "if I were king", where "were" doesn't actually agree in number with "I". Legislation tends to use a lot of the subjunctive, because (a) the rest of us don't, and legislation that was comprehensible would help us to obey it and (b) it has to do with things not presently being the case.
Also, pi = 4. Or maybe 3.2. The government has spoken, let it be written!
Completely different. Pi's definition can be independently confirmed. The definition of "planet" is just something a group of people decide. The IAU evidently can't be trusted to make the definition. Perhaps New Mexico's legislature will be better...
Actually, if you run a GNU/Linux box and look at a lot of command-line utils, the abbreviations they use are certainly the standard. So for instance, the output of ifconfig on my computer currently reports, amongst others: GNU and BSD command-line utils also generally provide both options to output values in non-standard (i.e. 1 KB = 1 024 bytes) and standard sizes (e.g. "ls -h" will give non-standard output, whereas "ls --si" (on GNU at least) will give standard output).
Similarly, I just bought a 4 GB USB flash drive, and it has a formatted capacity of 4 000 000 000 bytes. Debian's apt-get reports my download speed as being 13 kB/s.
So both aspects of the standard are in practical use.
As for what "most people" will do: They'll say whatever their computer says. And at least in metric countries, I suspect most people would be surprised if you told them they're wrong when they approximate 28 324 124 as 28 megabytes.
And, you know, announce a price.
350 USD. Been well-known since, you know, January. They've even announced prices for the car and hackers kits (75 and 200 USD IIRC).
The lack of EDGE GPRS is an absolute dealbreaker.
This phone wasn't meant to be perfect for everyone. The iPhone doesn't do GPS, so I won't be buying it;[*] otoh a fast network connection is not something I really need on a screen that small. Other OpenMoko phones might be released if the Neo1973 does well enough that might be more suited to your needs.
[*] Not that I know when, or if, it'll be released out here in Australia. It's hard to know if we count as 'Europe', 'Asia', or 'WTF? You exist?!'.
Ah! Now it makes sense. You should've said that it the first place :)
And now for something completely different...
Ah. I even checked up the dictionary for "sold" and it only gave variations of "to sell". As I say, there is no special relationship between (this sense of) "sold" and "soldier", although it's possible if you go far enough (common origin some five thousand years ago rather than borrowing).
:)
I can therefore only assume "sold" is either particularly specialist terminology or not an English word, which explains my confusion
I do not know what "sold" is in this context. If you're referring to the word in the phrase "I sold my labor", then that's the past tense of "sell", it's no more special than "teach"->"taught" or even "walk"->"walked"... Certainly has no relationship to "solidus".
The issue isn't whether it can be changed; of course it can.[*] The issue is how it's set up by default.
[*] Though for some things requires the source code, but that's not really harder than what you're suggesting.
I don't mean to criticise *you* (not least because I don't know who you are!), but why is it such a bad thing for MS not to provide tools for Mac OS X, but there's nothing wrong with the fact that they don't provide anything for Red Hat.
I used to assume it was just because MS didn't compete with Mac OS X because of PPC hardware (according to some strained definition), but they did with GNU/Linux because it usually runs on the x86 platform, but even that strained argument no longer applies...
Word processing is never marked up by hand,
Only by definition. People using HTML or LaTeX are essentially "word processing by hand", particuly so if the intended destination is print, as it usually is with LaTeX and occasionally is for HTML (between the time I switched to Linux and learnt about LaTeX, HTML was basically my only option for doing school assignments; OpenOffice didn't exist yet).
And even "by definition" basically ignores Word Perfect's "show codes" feature. I doubt anyone uses it anymore, but the fact that it existed implies a use...
Sounds like a sure way to piss off the religious and atheists alike :]
Sigh. How many times must Slashdot be reminded that there is absolutely no incompatibility between religion and evolution! Specific religions may have particular feelings, but the largest organised religion, which accounts for one in six of the world's population, and which does turn to Genesis for some of its answers, has absolutely no feelings on the matter. (And in fact, I was taught exclusively evolution at a school run by these folk.)
A couple of Volvos actually empirically leave the air cleaner than before.
More info? I find that a bit hard to believe. Where does it go?
I fail to see the difference between "this January" and "last January". Aren't both actually about January 2007?
The meaning of "next" and "last" is the point of frequent confusion. To some people, they refer to soonest or most recent event mentioned: This is usually what someone means when they say "turn left at the next lights".
But in reference to time, people often use the construction "next x" or "last x" to refer to the x of the preceding or following time period. So "next Tuesday" would mean "Tuesday of next week", "last January" would mean "January of last year". "This x" then refers to the x of the current time period, so "this Tuesday" and "this January" refer to the Tuesday or January of the current week or year, regardless of if they're in the future or the past.
Still others use "this x" to refer to the soonest x after today, and "next x" to refer to one after that.
Then there's also the "Tuesday week" construction, referring to second Tuesday after today. This is obviously the same as that last definition of "next x" in the case that x is a day of the week.
I think it's partially a regional and partially a personal variation. I'd just make sure your audience understands you if it's important, and I wouldn't be offended if they don't. Welcome to English!
Testing is right out.
I've been using Debian on my desktop for around two years now, and I've been using Debian Testing for all that time. Since I switched, I've heard that a few times, but have never understood why. Since 1998, I've used Gentoo, FreeBSD, Red Hat, Slackware, Ubuntu and Yellow Dog, and I've finally found a distro I'm happy to use; I've completely stopped looking.
Why is it that I should be scared of Testing? I've heard that a package can be unusable for a month, but I've never had that happen to me before. Why does Testing exist if it's so bad?
Thanks!
I think the idea that humans can only travel long distances over land should have been disproved by the population of Australia and the Pacific islands.
Australia and Oceania/the Pacific Islands are completely different. Australia has been populated for tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of years. It's usually accepted that the Aborigines came to Australia via a landbridge connecting the mainland to New Guinea. Another landbridge connected Victoria to Tasmania, allowing the Aborigines to get there without using boats at all.
Oceania/the Pacific Islands, including New Zealand, were colonised at a much later date (NZ, for instance, was populated only around 1000 years ago). Boats were used, but it was so much later that it provides no more evidence that people could first have colonised America using boats than the fact that Europeans eventually colonised America using boats does.