The issue is that children are now exposed to adult behavior at earlier and earlier ages, before their minds fully understand the scope and impact of their behavior.
And the solution of course is to prevent your children from having access to any more information on "adult behaviour" until they're out the house, thereby rendering their minds even less capable of understanding such behaviours. Or at least, thats what the actions of so many conservative parents would imply. Don't you see how ridiculous that is? You don't teach children to handle situations by hiding them away from situations. People somehow get this idea from somewhere that children's tender little brains aren't capable of handling topics such as HIV, STDs, sex etc. Children are not as stupid as most people seem to think, children tend to behave stupid when people treat them as stupid, i.e. treat your daughter as if she is incapable of handling topics such as sex, pregnancy, STDs, contraceptives, and guaranteed, she will behave as if she cannot handle those topics. Treat children as if they are intelligent, responsible and capable, and they will respond as such.
Actually, a number of peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated that there *IS* a link between consupmtion of violence (tv, movies) and violent behaviour
So what exactly has that got to do with the effects of pornography on children? Since when did violence == sex? Sex and violence in media are two different things completely, despite their being commonly grouped together by people with Christian backgrounds.
".. the worlds biggest porn shop with people who regularly abduct children and plenty of other nasty things?"... "Of course not... the internet is the same thing"
Oh! For a moment I thought you were talking about the Internet
it is ADDICTIVE and has been shown to cause relationship problems later in life
Could you perhaps be so kind as to point us to the studies showing that porn causes relationship problems later in life? (scientific ones.. a link to an article on "www.cc.org" (christian coalition) doesn't count)
You could fight it technically, sure. But the problem with that is, you wouldn't be solving the problem - you may be fixing some of the symptoms of the problem, but the problem would still be there. Symptomatic treatment is a lousy substitute for a cure. This is a political problem, it should be solved politically. The problem is with the lousy ideological reasoning and motivations behind the treaty. By attempting to fight this technically, you allow the ideology to pass, and in doing so you lend it weight, people will believe "ok the ideology can't be all bad because this passed as law". Circumventing the law after the fact by technical means is hardly going to have any benefit. Parodies, whistle-blowing etc all have their valid place, and the fight should be to have these things maintain their status of validity (or in places where they are not valid, to teach others why they are valid). Such things should not be made illegal in the first place. Why allow it to become illegal and then make weak attempts to patch the problem afterwards? There shouldn't have to be a need for networks like freenet in the first place. The existence of such networks implies that their is something at fault with the non-"underground" technologies - the more popular something like freenet becomes, the more sure a sign it is that "above-ground" technologies and laws have problems that should rather be addressed. Why do people always seem to want to treat things symptomatically instead of solving the real problems? Is it because its usually easier?
Yup, you said it. Luckily we have moved away in general from socialism toward democracy (South Africa in case you were wondering), and the government-granted monopoly to our absolute-shit Telkom is set to run out next year. I'm hoping it brings some real competition into the market along with some niftier bandwidth options. One can never quite predict though, as the US have demonstrated, abusive monopolies sometimes find ways of maintaining their status.
Not all that bad? 600MB at 28.8 will take around 2.5 to 3 days. That's assuming you don't get disconnected on a dial-up, or if you're not using dial-up, its assuming that you don't actually want to use that connection for anything else for those 3 days. And in my country (admittedly I'm not a "westerner") internet access is time-metered (stupid telcoms monopoly:(..), we'd pay roughly the equivalent of 25 US$ for 3 days. Thats just for the time spent online, that doesn't include the monthly ISP fee.
If the statement was "GODDAMN COMMIE OPPRESSORS TRIED TO HAX0R OUR POWER! WHERES MY GUN
Actually thats essentially how the statement sounded. I'm sorry if you're too subjectively involved to see the situation from an objective, outside perspective.
If the Chinese government is sponsoring these 'hacker attacks'
I simply cannot believe how thoroughly brainwashed Americans seem to be. I hope that it is only a minority. If it is, it is certainly quite a vocal minority.
So the solution is for users should spend extra money on additional software and go to extra trouble to stop companies from tracking them? I think it should rather be illegal for companies to gather information in that way in the first place. Thats the only way to really solve the problem - anything else, and you're not curing the problem, only its symptoms.
I see no problem with them...it's just a tactic for getting usage statistics about your site. And what's wrong with that
You missed the point. Thats fine, there is nothing wrong with that, but that is not the issue here. Web bugs are not attempt to gather statistics at a specific site, web bugs are attempts to track surfing across multiple unrelated sites. For example, say I visit a gay porn site, which have some doubleclick ads with hidden bugs in. Then off I go to Amazon.com to order a book about fly fishing, and unbeknownst to me, once again doubleclick has web bugs on Amazons site. So now a company (doubleclick) has a database linking the same user to those two completely unrelated activities. Now all doubleclick needs to do is establish some sort of affiliation with Amazon, and whammo, doubleclick suddenly knows my name, and has a database indicating that I have bought books on fly-fishing, like gay porn, browse slashdot, am anti-Microsoft, enjoy reading The Onion every Wednesday, whatever, they have a huge database on me. All without my consent or knowledge (which happens to be illegal in my country, but it would seem not in the US.) Sure you can say "don't use cookies" or "delete your cookies regulary", but what the fuck, thats not a solution, thats purely symptomatic treatment of the REAL problem, which is that these companies should be strictly prohibitied from doing this sort of thing in the first place. Either way, more than 80% of people are not even going to know how to delete their cookies or will just be too ignorant of the problem to care. Americans seem to love treating the symptoms of a problem but ignoring the actual problem itself.
And you may not think doubleclick would be able to collect much info - but trust me on this - double is EVERYWHERE. It is virtually impossible to do casual web browsing for more than a few hours without getting doubleclick cookies. Try it. Delete all your cookies, browse for a while (casual browsing, e.g. some slashdot, maybe some cnn or other news sites, maybe some gaming sites etc), and see what cookies you have. Chances are extremely good you have doubleclick.net, bfast.com, hitbox.com, flycast.com, avenuea.com and a few of the other very common ones.
We're not talking about web statistics or cookies here. Get the facts straight.
From a web developer's point of view, if they didn't, how would your log-in information be retained when you look at a web page that isnt dynamicly (sp?) created
Did you read what the article is about? Its not about cookies, its about web bugs, which are a totally different thing. They may use cookies, but cookies themselves are not web bugs. Slashdot can perfectly well retain your log-in information using cookies without bugging you.
What bothers me most is the scale on which the tracking is done; since so many sites use particular ad agencies (say doubleclick) they can build a list of many of the sites I've visited. For example, say I browse a gay porn site, then I browse a Quake3 games site, then I visit Amazon to look for comic books. Double-click need only have an information-supplying affiliation with one of those that may have my "real" personal details, name etc (for example Amazon), from that they can build a fairly extensive database of what I do online. All without my consent, which is against the law in my country, but in the US it seems companies can do this openly with no fear, so I'm guessing its not illegal in the US.
a default Windows install may, for example, automatically contain some sort of MS web portal
What I meant to say here was "some sort of MS web portal built into the desktop". It doesn't quite sound the same without that part:) So there where you currently have "my computer", "recycle bin" etc on your desktop, there will be links straight to MS content providers, e.g. "news", "stock quotes".. possibly not even links, but the content itself - a web page portal effect.
Smart tags can be easily turned off by a page author. There is a META tag that does this
Sure, in this version. MS knows precisely how to introduce things gradually, so that users get used to the Microsoft way. Currently, there is a button on the toolbar. 1 year later, that button on the toolbar becomes a checkbox under the "advanced internet options". 1 year after that, meta tags don't work any more. 1 year after that, ordinary links and smart tag links stop looking as distinctly different. With each change Microsoft explains the benefits and why this is great; with each change, someone on slashdot defends Microsoft's actions by saying "but you can turn it off" or whatever. But over the course of a few years, the "Microsoft Web" and the "Internet World Wide Web" have become blurred into one and the same thing in the eyes of the majority of the public. Essentially, within five to fifteen years, the WWW will have effectively been subverted into something that is more like the proprietary networks of yesteryear (e.g. Compuserve), since most pages will be linking to MS provided content, and MS will be a huge content provider by that time. Everything that you may have wanted, from news to stock quotes to comic strips, will be supplied by an MS provider, simply because consumers found it much more convenient, since support for access to those providers will have been fairly tightly integrated into the OS by then - a default Windows install may, for example, automatically contain some sort of MS web portal. Sure, the real Internet WWW will still exist, but 80$ of people won't bother much with it.
English phonetics is only "ridiculous" when it's learned with one eye on the written form
How can you possibly 'seperate' the written form from the spoken? The very fact that it is essentially impossible to deduce pronunciation from spelling is ridiculous in itself. "Gill" and "fill" look like they should be pronounced the same, but aren't. "One" and "won" look different but are pronounced the same. "Going", "boing" and "doing" all look the same, but are all three pronounced differently. "One"/"tone". "Edit"/"edited" (one "t"), "Spot"/"spotted" (two "t"s). "Post"/"lost". "Meat"/"great". "Dome"/"come". "Comb"/"womb". Pronunciation of "women". Words like like "light" and "thought", which if you didn't just happen to know how they should be pronounced, you'd have a tough time figuring it out. "Tough"/"dough"/"plough" - all look the same, but three different pronunciations. "Dough","doe","dow" - three spellings for a word that sounds the same. There are hundreds of inconsistencies, those are just a few off the top of my head. And all of these things have to be learnt on an individual basis. Its silly to try pretend that these inconsistencies "don't count" by making some assertion that pronunciation should be learnt without "one eye on the written form". Why should it have to be learnt this way in the first place. Lets face it, lets not be zealous about it - English is ridiculous. I'm not anti-English, actually I happen to like English, although it may not sound like it:). I'm all for English being taught everywhere possible, and I do believe that English should become an "international language" of sorts, as it already has to an extent. But that doesn't mean we should ignore all its flaws. English is like the Win32 API - it has all the obvious evidence (kludges, nuances and inconsistencies) of something that evolved over a long period of time from many seperate sources, as opposed to something that was designed.
Not in my classes. Any student of mine who tries to use third person plural as a substitute for "he" or "she"
Uh.. thats the thing.. you CAN (as far as I know, its allowed). In place of using the term "his/her", e.g: "the reader should boot up his/her computer and then format their C drive" is valid in place of "the reader should boot up his/her computer and then format his/her C drive". Unless you misunderstood what I was referring to?
This is no more difficult than the difference between "bring" and "take" or "come" and "go", and strikes me as inexcusably ignorant
Ignorant it may be, but if you're looking at a basic rule that the majority of people can't remember, then you have to admit that the problem may lie with the rule, not the people. Its like the butterfly ballot issue - people debate whether it was confusing or not - but the fact is, people got confused by it - therefore, it WAS confusing. There really is no question, if people found it confusing, then it is confusing. These things (English language / ballots) are designed for people - not a small minority of the most intelligent people, but ALL people. "Ignorance" tends to spread by spoken word too. When I was still in school I could remember the difference between "lend" and "borrow". Once I left school my English skills started to slide a bit, as they weren't actively maintained. Also, I mixed a lot with people of a different language at University, who tend to speak English with very broken grammar. After some years I heard the terms "lend"/"borrow" used interchangably so many times that I can't remember the difference any more.
People, this user has been trolling unashamedly for some time now on slashdot. Ignore him/her. I've stopped even reading his/her posts (they're always so tempting to reply to).
Thats because most people don't know better. Most people assume that it was their own fault when something goes wrong. When my sister bought a computer, and it was crashing regularly and had corrupted / poorly installed drivers out of the box, did she think for one minute that the software might be defective? Did she think for even one minute that perhaps the vendor who sold her the computer had not installed things properly? NO. Not for one minute. The first person she calls is me, and in her exact words: "Help! I've messed up my computer.". She knew next to nothing about PCs at the time. The problems that I found on her computer could only have been caused by the PC vendors incompetence. I told her "take it back, they screwed up, not you". Sadly this sort of thing is very common in my country in the PC industry.
I must say I wholeheartedly agree. When people try tell me MS Word is the best word processor, I can only assume that they have only ever used it to write a few simple letters or something. Has anyone else ever tried to work with "master documents" in Office 2000? There are so many bugs its unreal. If any of the subdocuments, for example, are read-only, and you try generate a TOC, MS Word goes into an infinite loop hogging all available CPU, and has to be killed manually. Sometimes you save your master document, all looks well, but when you open it again, ALL THE SUBDOCUMENTS ARE JUST GONE. Sometimes it just plain crashes. Try to move one a seperator thats between a subdocument - you can neither undo the feature using "undo" nor move it back manually - MS Word tells you "one of the documents is locked", which is BS. And ever tried to get page numbering / chapter numbering / paragraph numbering / figure numbering etc to work properly in a master document? Or for that matter just to get consistent headers/footers. Jeez, that stuff is buggy even by MS standards.
Speaking of MS IE bugs, why the hell does IE make me Edit/Paste TWICE whenever I copy/paste text into the/. "post comment" box? The problem with that sort of bug is that people soon stop noticing that they are there.. I've just learned to always paste twice. Likewise, I've just learned that when you alt+tab to an IE window after opening another IE window, the menus just plain don't work, and you have to alt+tab an extra time. People quickly adapt to work around these bugs in their daily lives, and then go onto/. and defend MS's products saying "IE is excellent" etc.
Does anyone know if these deals involve exclusivity toward the big five? One of the biggest problems with the music industry these days seems to be that the major labels control the distribution channels, thereby shutting others out (hmm.. exactly like the software industry it seems). What we don't need (but what the RIAA have been fighting so hard for) is to have the same companies gaining control of 90% or more of the "new big distribution medium".
Makes sense. The card in question which I bought was an SMC 1211TX, and its not exactly for a mission critical application - its just for my home PC and to play games at the occasional LAN (frankly I haven't even used it yet). Anyway, I did a deja search before I bought the card (as I usually do before buying hardware) to see if there were reports of other people having problems with the card, and the only problem I found was that some people had slowness problems on somewhat older versions of Linux. I tested the card on both RH7 and W9X before I bought it (fairly informal arrangement with my supplier luckily), and it seemed to work fine on both.
I have several compilation CD's I've made for the sake of having compact "best of" collections
These days thats almost the only way to keep it worth the effort to listen to music, given that most CDs have one (maybe two) good songs and the rest just filler.
but English can be understood no matter how many mistakes are introduced
I can think of many people who are supposedly educated, who have English as their primary language, who often fail to understand things. How often does it happen, for example, that someone posts something that is obviously humorous, only to have several people who completely miss the fact that the post is humorous reply? I mean, we have supposedly educated adults who cannot even pick up the basic tone of a simple piece of writing. How many of us have posted something well-thought out and well-written to an online forum, only to get some inane reply from some moron who completely missed the most fundamental point of your post?
Mind you, this probably has nothing to do with the English language, and everything to do with culture and education ("uh duh, I don't want to think"; "why do they teach us this crap at school that we're never going to use"; "who needs to learn how to use English properly, as long as people can still understand each other" etc etc).
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is that children are now exposed to adult behavior at earlier and earlier ages, before their minds fully understand the scope and impact of their behavior.
And the solution of course is to prevent your children from having access to any more information on "adult behaviour" until they're out the house, thereby rendering their minds even less capable of understanding such behaviours. Or at least, thats what the actions of so many conservative parents would imply. Don't you see how ridiculous that is? You don't teach children to handle situations by hiding them away from situations. People somehow get this idea from somewhere that children's tender little brains aren't capable of handling topics such as HIV, STDs, sex etc. Children are not as stupid as most people seem to think, children tend to behave stupid when people treat them as stupid, i.e. treat your daughter as if she is incapable of handling topics such as sex, pregnancy, STDs, contraceptives, and guaranteed, she will behave as if she cannot handle those topics. Treat children as if they are intelligent, responsible and capable, and they will respond as such.
Actually, a number of peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated that there *IS* a link between consupmtion of violence (tv, movies) and violent behaviour
So what exactly has that got to do with the effects of pornography on children? Since when did violence == sex? Sex and violence in media are two different things completely, despite their being commonly grouped together by people with Christian backgrounds.
".. the worlds biggest porn shop with people who regularly abduct children and plenty of other nasty things?" ... "Of course not... the internet is the same thing"
Oh! For a moment I thought you were talking about the Internet
it is ADDICTIVE and has been shown to cause relationship problems later in life
Could you perhaps be so kind as to point us to the studies showing that porn causes relationship problems later in life? (scientific ones .. a link to an article on "www.cc.org" (christian coalition) doesn't count)
You could fight it technically, sure. But the problem with that is, you wouldn't be solving the problem - you may be fixing some of the symptoms of the problem, but the problem would still be there. Symptomatic treatment is a lousy substitute for a cure. This is a political problem, it should be solved politically. The problem is with the lousy ideological reasoning and motivations behind the treaty. By attempting to fight this technically, you allow the ideology to pass, and in doing so you lend it weight, people will believe "ok the ideology can't be all bad because this passed as law". Circumventing the law after the fact by technical means is hardly going to have any benefit. Parodies, whistle-blowing etc all have their valid place, and the fight should be to have these things maintain their status of validity (or in places where they are not valid, to teach others why they are valid). Such things should not be made illegal in the first place. Why allow it to become illegal and then make weak attempts to patch the problem afterwards? There shouldn't have to be a need for networks like freenet in the first place. The existence of such networks implies that their is something at fault with the non-"underground" technologies - the more popular something like freenet becomes, the more sure a sign it is that "above-ground" technologies and laws have problems that should rather be addressed. Why do people always seem to want to treat things symptomatically instead of solving the real problems? Is it because its usually easier?
Yup, you said it. Luckily we have moved away in general from socialism toward democracy (South Africa in case you were wondering), and the government-granted monopoly to our absolute-shit Telkom is set to run out next year. I'm hoping it brings some real competition into the market along with some niftier bandwidth options. One can never quite predict though, as the US have demonstrated, abusive monopolies sometimes find ways of maintaining their status.
What do you mean '5 cents'? The guy used a figure of 50 cents (+10% to 55c) in his post. Where did you see 5 cents?
Not all that bad? 600MB at 28.8 will take around 2.5 to 3 days. That's assuming you don't get disconnected on a dial-up, or if you're not using dial-up, its assuming that you don't actually want to use that connection for anything else for those 3 days. And in my country (admittedly I'm not a "westerner") internet access is time-metered (stupid telcoms monopoly :( ..), we'd pay roughly the equivalent of 25 US$ for 3 days. Thats just for the time spent online, that doesn't include the monthly ISP fee.
If the statement was "GODDAMN COMMIE OPPRESSORS TRIED TO HAX0R OUR POWER! WHERES MY GUN
Actually thats essentially how the statement sounded. I'm sorry if you're too subjectively involved to see the situation from an objective, outside perspective.
If the Chinese government is sponsoring these 'hacker attacks'
I simply cannot believe how thoroughly brainwashed Americans seem to be. I hope that it is only a minority. If it is, it is certainly quite a vocal minority.
You also forgot "old news! we were doing research on these back in 1816 already when i was a grad student at MIT, they're not great".
So the solution is for users should spend extra money on additional software and go to extra trouble to stop companies from tracking them? I think it should rather be illegal for companies to gather information in that way in the first place. Thats the only way to really solve the problem - anything else, and you're not curing the problem, only its symptoms.
I see no problem with them...it's just a tactic for getting usage statistics about your site. And what's wrong with that
You missed the point. Thats fine, there is nothing wrong with that, but that is not the issue here. Web bugs are not attempt to gather statistics at a specific site, web bugs are attempts to track surfing across multiple unrelated sites. For example, say I visit a gay porn site, which have some doubleclick ads with hidden bugs in. Then off I go to Amazon.com to order a book about fly fishing, and unbeknownst to me, once again doubleclick has web bugs on Amazons site. So now a company (doubleclick) has a database linking the same user to those two completely unrelated activities. Now all doubleclick needs to do is establish some sort of affiliation with Amazon, and whammo, doubleclick suddenly knows my name, and has a database indicating that I have bought books on fly-fishing, like gay porn, browse slashdot, am anti-Microsoft, enjoy reading The Onion every Wednesday, whatever, they have a huge database on me. All without my consent or knowledge (which happens to be illegal in my country, but it would seem not in the US.) Sure you can say "don't use cookies" or "delete your cookies regulary", but what the fuck, thats not a solution, thats purely symptomatic treatment of the REAL problem, which is that these companies should be strictly prohibitied from doing this sort of thing in the first place. Either way, more than 80% of people are not even going to know how to delete their cookies or will just be too ignorant of the problem to care. Americans seem to love treating the symptoms of a problem but ignoring the actual problem itself.
And you may not think doubleclick would be able to collect much info - but trust me on this - double is EVERYWHERE. It is virtually impossible to do casual web browsing for more than a few hours without getting doubleclick cookies. Try it. Delete all your cookies, browse for a while (casual browsing, e.g. some slashdot, maybe some cnn or other news sites, maybe some gaming sites etc), and see what cookies you have. Chances are extremely good you have doubleclick.net, bfast.com, hitbox.com, flycast.com, avenuea.com and a few of the other very common ones.
We're not talking about web statistics or cookies here. Get the facts straight.
From a web developer's point of view, if they didn't, how would your log-in information be retained when you look at a web page that isnt dynamicly (sp?) created
Did you read what the article is about? Its not about cookies, its about web bugs, which are a totally different thing. They may use cookies, but cookies themselves are not web bugs. Slashdot can perfectly well retain your log-in information using cookies without bugging you.
What bothers me most is the scale on which the tracking is done; since so many sites use particular ad agencies (say doubleclick) they can build a list of many of the sites I've visited. For example, say I browse a gay porn site, then I browse a Quake3 games site, then I visit Amazon to look for comic books. Double-click need only have an information-supplying affiliation with one of those that may have my "real" personal details, name etc (for example Amazon), from that they can build a fairly extensive database of what I do online. All without my consent, which is against the law in my country, but in the US it seems companies can do this openly with no fear, so I'm guessing its not illegal in the US.
a default Windows install may, for example, automatically contain some sort of MS web portal
What I meant to say here was "some sort of MS web portal built into the desktop". It doesn't quite sound the same without that part :) So there where you currently have "my computer", "recycle bin" etc on your desktop, there will be links straight to MS content providers, e.g. "news", "stock quotes" .. possibly not even links, but the content itself - a web page portal effect.
Smart tags can be easily turned off by a page author. There is a META tag that does this
Sure, in this version. MS knows precisely how to introduce things gradually, so that users get used to the Microsoft way. Currently, there is a button on the toolbar. 1 year later, that button on the toolbar becomes a checkbox under the "advanced internet options". 1 year after that, meta tags don't work any more. 1 year after that, ordinary links and smart tag links stop looking as distinctly different. With each change Microsoft explains the benefits and why this is great; with each change, someone on slashdot defends Microsoft's actions by saying "but you can turn it off" or whatever. But over the course of a few years, the "Microsoft Web" and the "Internet World Wide Web" have become blurred into one and the same thing in the eyes of the majority of the public. Essentially, within five to fifteen years, the WWW will have effectively been subverted into something that is more like the proprietary networks of yesteryear (e.g. Compuserve), since most pages will be linking to MS provided content, and MS will be a huge content provider by that time. Everything that you may have wanted, from news to stock quotes to comic strips, will be supplied by an MS provider, simply because consumers found it much more convenient, since support for access to those providers will have been fairly tightly integrated into the OS by then - a default Windows install may, for example, automatically contain some sort of MS web portal. Sure, the real Internet WWW will still exist, but 80$ of people won't bother much with it.
Just the direction things are going.
English phonetics is only "ridiculous" when it's learned with one eye on the written form
How can you possibly 'seperate' the written form from the spoken? The very fact that it is essentially impossible to deduce pronunciation from spelling is ridiculous in itself. "Gill" and "fill" look like they should be pronounced the same, but aren't. "One" and "won" look different but are pronounced the same. "Going", "boing" and "doing" all look the same, but are all three pronounced differently. "One"/"tone". "Edit"/"edited" (one "t"), "Spot"/"spotted" (two "t"s). "Post"/"lost". "Meat"/"great". "Dome"/"come". "Comb"/"womb". Pronunciation of "women". Words like like "light" and "thought", which if you didn't just happen to know how they should be pronounced, you'd have a tough time figuring it out. "Tough"/"dough"/"plough" - all look the same, but three different pronunciations. "Dough","doe","dow" - three spellings for a word that sounds the same. There are hundreds of inconsistencies, those are just a few off the top of my head. And all of these things have to be learnt on an individual basis. Its silly to try pretend that these inconsistencies "don't count" by making some assertion that pronunciation should be learnt without "one eye on the written form". Why should it have to be learnt this way in the first place. Lets face it, lets not be zealous about it - English is ridiculous. I'm not anti-English, actually I happen to like English, although it may not sound like it :). I'm all for English being taught everywhere possible, and I do believe that English should become an "international language" of sorts, as it already has to an extent. But that doesn't mean we should ignore all its flaws. English is like the Win32 API - it has all the obvious evidence (kludges, nuances and inconsistencies) of something that evolved over a long period of time from many seperate sources, as opposed to something that was designed.
Not in my classes. Any student of mine who tries to use third person plural as a substitute for "he" or "she"
Uh .. thats the thing .. you CAN (as far as I know, its allowed). In place of using the term "his/her", e.g: "the reader should boot up his/her computer and then format their C drive" is valid in place of "the reader should boot up his/her computer and then format his/her C drive". Unless you misunderstood what I was referring to?
This is no more difficult than the difference between "bring" and "take" or "come" and "go", and strikes me as inexcusably ignorant
Ignorant it may be, but if you're looking at a basic rule that the majority of people can't remember, then you have to admit that the problem may lie with the rule, not the people. Its like the butterfly ballot issue - people debate whether it was confusing or not - but the fact is, people got confused by it - therefore, it WAS confusing. There really is no question, if people found it confusing, then it is confusing. These things (English language / ballots) are designed for people - not a small minority of the most intelligent people, but ALL people. "Ignorance" tends to spread by spoken word too. When I was still in school I could remember the difference between "lend" and "borrow". Once I left school my English skills started to slide a bit, as they weren't actively maintained. Also, I mixed a lot with people of a different language at University, who tend to speak English with very broken grammar. After some years I heard the terms "lend"/"borrow" used interchangably so many times that I can't remember the difference any more.
People, this user has been trolling unashamedly for some time now on slashdot. Ignore him/her. I've stopped even reading his/her posts (they're always so tempting to reply to).
"For most people, Microsoft is fine"
Thats because most people don't know better. Most people assume that it was their own fault when something goes wrong. When my sister bought a computer, and it was crashing regularly and had corrupted / poorly installed drivers out of the box, did she think for one minute that the software might be defective? Did she think for even one minute that perhaps the vendor who sold her the computer had not installed things properly? NO. Not for one minute. The first person she calls is me, and in her exact words: "Help! I've messed up my computer.". She knew next to nothing about PCs at the time. The problems that I found on her computer could only have been caused by the PC vendors incompetence. I told her "take it back, they screwed up, not you". Sadly this sort of thing is very common in my country in the PC industry.
You obviously haven't spent much time using them.
I must say I wholeheartedly agree. When people try tell me MS Word is the best word processor, I can only assume that they have only ever used it to write a few simple letters or something. Has anyone else ever tried to work with "master documents" in Office 2000? There are so many bugs its unreal. If any of the subdocuments, for example, are read-only, and you try generate a TOC, MS Word goes into an infinite loop hogging all available CPU, and has to be killed manually. Sometimes you save your master document, all looks well, but when you open it again, ALL THE SUBDOCUMENTS ARE JUST GONE. Sometimes it just plain crashes. Try to move one a seperator thats between a subdocument - you can neither undo the feature using "undo" nor move it back manually - MS Word tells you "one of the documents is locked", which is BS. And ever tried to get page numbering / chapter numbering / paragraph numbering / figure numbering etc to work properly in a master document? Or for that matter just to get consistent headers/footers. Jeez, that stuff is buggy even by MS standards.
Speaking of MS IE bugs, why the hell does IE make me Edit/Paste TWICE whenever I copy/paste text into the /. "post comment" box? The problem with that sort of bug is that people soon stop noticing that they are there .. I've just learned to always paste twice. Likewise, I've just learned that when you alt+tab to an IE window after opening another IE window, the menus just plain don't work, and you have to alt+tab an extra time. People quickly adapt to work around these bugs in their daily lives, and then go onto /. and defend MS's products saying "IE is excellent" etc.
Does anyone know if these deals involve exclusivity toward the big five? One of the biggest problems with the music industry these days seems to be that the major labels control the distribution channels, thereby shutting others out (hmm .. exactly like the software industry it seems). What we don't need (but what the RIAA have been fighting so hard for) is to have the same companies gaining control of 90% or more of the "new big distribution medium".
Makes sense. The card in question which I bought was an SMC 1211TX, and its not exactly for a mission critical application - its just for my home PC and to play games at the occasional LAN (frankly I haven't even used it yet). Anyway, I did a deja search before I bought the card (as I usually do before buying hardware) to see if there were reports of other people having problems with the card, and the only problem I found was that some people had slowness problems on somewhat older versions of Linux. I tested the card on both RH7 and W9X before I bought it (fairly informal arrangement with my supplier luckily), and it seemed to work fine on both.
I have several compilation CD's I've made for the sake of having compact "best of" collections
These days thats almost the only way to keep it worth the effort to listen to music, given that most CDs have one (maybe two) good songs and the rest just filler.
but English can be understood no matter how many mistakes are introduced
I can think of many people who are supposedly educated, who have English as their primary language, who often fail to understand things. How often does it happen, for example, that someone posts something that is obviously humorous, only to have several people who completely miss the fact that the post is humorous reply? I mean, we have supposedly educated adults who cannot even pick up the basic tone of a simple piece of writing. How many of us have posted something well-thought out and well-written to an online forum, only to get some inane reply from some moron who completely missed the most fundamental point of your post?
Mind you, this probably has nothing to do with the English language, and everything to do with culture and education ("uh duh, I don't want to think"; "why do they teach us this crap at school that we're never going to use"; "who needs to learn how to use English properly, as long as people can still understand each other" etc etc).