I agree with it. The article talks about the cameras on the back of buses as being to watch other cars but in fact they are to aid the driver when reversing and are not connected to anyone else.
No, this just is wrong. There are "Bus lane" cameras on buses, looking backwards, that exist to enforce the "no cars in bus lanes" rule.
Personally I make sure that I can recover the system if it all goes wrong. Backups if necessary, splitting the mirror if it has mirrored system disks, that sort of thing. Reboot beforehand too, to get the machine in a known state.
Sorry - talking in jargon again. An oxygen fire is just a fire in an enriched oxygen atmosphere. Seems innocent, but things that don't normally burn (such as steel plate) will ignite. There is also a risk of spontaneous combustion of plastic and rubber if the percentage oxygen is high enough.
There are very difficult to put out because
a) it's hard to remove the fuel - steel plate will burn in these conditions (very hot, lots of oxygen)
b) it's hard to remove the source of ignition (as things are spontaneously combusting anyway)
c) It's hard to remove the oxygen (as there is so much of it)
There is a classic chemistry experiment with steel wool and liquid oxygen. First you try to set steel wool alight - it can be done but is smolders gently. Then you try setting steel wool that has been soaked in liquid oxygen alight - whoosh: looks like a magnesium flare going off.
The theory that I believe is that a torpedo exploded. This was not the warhead going off, but the oxidiser. The Russian navy use hydrogen peroxide as an oxidiser - it is run through a catalyser to produce oxygen and water. On its own it is extremely safe. The torpedo system was thought to be live (they were about to do some test firing so this is a good assumption) and this puts the peroxide under pressure. This is the normal state of affairs.
What happen now was that one of the pipes carrying the peroxide leaked and started spraying peroxide over the inside of the torpedo tube. All that's needed now for an explosion is a) the tube is reasonably air-tight (which is probably true) and b) that there is copper (one of the catalysts for the peroxide to oxygen reaction) available - these would usually be pipes carrying propellent.
The British Navy learned in the fifties (after a similar incident) that copper was bad, and most people that used the peroxide method had removed copper (and any other catalysts) from the torpedoes. The Russians, due to a combination of suspicion, N-I-H syndrome, and a misplaced belief in their engineering prowess, are thought to have left the copper pipes in.
At this state - after the oxidiser pipe has broken - you have a tube full of oxygen, electrics, and fuel (both the steel of the tube, the warhead, and the propellant). The pressure of the tube is also increasing rapidly. Then either the tube bursts through hydrostatic pressure, causing sparks and an oxygen fire, or a spark in the torpedo triggers an oxygen fire. Oxygen fires are very fierce, act like explosions, and are very difficult to extinguish. Add that the fire was in the forward torpedo room - full of fuel and munitions - you have a disaster.
So, what you are saying that Microsoft have made your life so difficult with their licensing policies that you are willing to give them even more money if they will stop hassling you?
Riiighttt.....
Does nothing strike you as just a little bit odd about this? If not, I can send some goons round your house to vaguely menace you until you give them some money to go away. For a while.
Cost, in a business, are two sorts - capital and operational. What Worldcom have done here is picked a business at a discount compared to the capital expediture they would be required to make to build the same business. A fire sale in other words.
I suspect this will actually be a fairly cheap endeavor, when compared to the capital and recurring expenditures DSL providers faced over the past few years
Now, the recurring cost will be a bit less for Worldcom compared with Rhythms but not by a huge margin (basically by the amount it takes to service the smaller debt, plus some from economies of scale). So I don't think that this will be a fairly cheap endevour to run. However, as the DSL market is undergoing a shakeout there will be less competition, and this will push user costs up.
The equation is a bit less opex, low capex for the infrastructure, and more revenue generated due to price increases (and, possibly, provision of low cost high margin services to a larger pool of users). Hopefully, opex+capex servicing+investment revenue, or it's goodbye DSL.
and I've been stuck behind british tourists trying to work out which U.S. note is which because they are not different colo(u)rs, don't ask me why,
Probably because the banknotes of every other country in the world are different colours. Most are also different sizes - this helps the blind and partial sighted distinguish notes. And probably because of lack of familiarity.
Different systems of bank note counting can also be confusing: when I was in Uzbekistan they had currency steps of 1 and 3 (so you get 1 cym notes, 3 cym notes, 10 cym notes, 30 cym notes and so on). This seems easy, but once I paid for a one cym beer (my first!) with a 10 cym note, and got three 3cym notes as change; I was just completely flummoxed - that part of my brain that did money just could not grasp the existance of a "three unit" note.
but stupity
That's "stupidity" - but I wonder if you get irony either.
(this isn't really the word to discribe people who aren't used to another currency or aren't used to ATMs
Given that the human face recognition performed by the check-in agents did not keep the hijackers out, there is no reason to think that computer face recognition would help.
This does not make much sense. Generalising gives "Given that humans cannot do something means that computers cannot do it either" should explain. I really don't know what is meant here. We have something that is already happening poorly. Someone has suggested that using technology would improve it, and this is an infringement of civil liberties. Sorry, I just don't buy that argument.
Airlines have a right (and, de facto, an obligation, especially now) to know who is using them. Using computers can make their execution of this duty much more effective: it is counterproductive (to say the least), to demand that they forgo this because the use of this technology by some other body may infringe civil liberties.
It may be that the use of the same technology, for a different end, by a different body, will be an infringement of civil liberties: by all means fight that battle then. But to try to stop a technology that has beneficial uses because it also has bad uses is luddite.
And to fight the battle with the weapon "it's no better than what we've already got" is just dumb.
Hmmmm. I've ben to the UK, and they are "ahead" in cell phones in as much as they are all GSM, no old analog system left (or maybe none was deployed, thus the quick uptake on the newer system). It was also nice that they run their GSM at about 900Mhz so it works through walls and plants and stuff way better then here. Land line phones didn't seem any more advanced. Did you notice differently?
GSM phones work at two frequencies - 900MHz and 1800MHz (the US is 1900MHz). There was a large analog infrastructure, but this has gone (or will be gone very shortly). The reasons for this have been rehashed here several times, but in the UK the caller pays for the call which has lead to something like >80% of the population with a mobile. Mobile numbers are obviously mobile numbers too - in the UK they start with 07, compared to 01 or 02 for land lines, and 08 and 09 for special rates (from free to expensive). In the US I believe that the owner of the cellphone has to pay a proportion if people call. I know the reasons, but it always comes as a surprise to Europeans when they find this out.
I'm not sure about landline phones either - I can't think of any obvious way that they are different. Ditto PDAs.
TV in the UK is available in widescreen (if you get digital signals via satellite or cable). I don't know if that is the case in the US.
Our pubs are infinitely more advanced, and so is the beer. How do you drink that stuff over there?
In XP you can roll back schema changes too, I've just remembered. This is nice, and may save a little bit of time during testing (rollback as opposed to rebuild), but won't impact a production environment.
Most of what you said I agree with but not "Of course, Microsoft will be kept afloat by the 'oh but this ones based on NT! It's stable!' fanboys out there, but anybody who has seen NT in action knows it's inadequacy on older hardware, and people are finally getting used to the idea that they don't really need the latest version of windows or the latest processor for what they do.
Firstly Joe Public probably only has the vaguest idea of what NT is, so there is limited mileage on the "based on NT" bandwagon.
Secondly NT is stable on older hardware - it's the more modern stuff that tends to trip it up (it really doesn't understand IR ports and USB very well). NT server on fairly standard hardware can easily have uptimes of more than a year (provided you don't and try and log on to the box - there is (or was - it may be fixed now) a memory leak in the GDI routines which breaks the explorer shell fairly terminally after about 6 months. All the services still work, but the box is a bit of a basket case if you need to do something interactive.
I'm not sure about people and new machines/OS. The machine I'm using now is triple boot box (Mandrake, Win98, W2K Advanced Server) with dual 350P2s and 256MB of ram. So fairly long in the tooth now. I've not seen anything that I want to do computer wise that I can't do on this box. So no reason to upgrade here. But I see lots of computers with a much higher spec being sold as the owner has upgraded to a more recent machine. What are these people doing with their machines?
So I think people may realise they don't need the new machine, but they still seem to want one. Then there is the monopoly leveraging that superwhizzy app only works on XP, to "encourage" people to upgrade to it.
and look at every windows release -- you'll see a huge group trying to fool themselves that 'THIS one will be good!'.
W2K was actually a good release. Probably too good. Having looked at XP from the server end (and particuarly the directory services bit of it, which is what I do at the moment) there is almost nothing that has changed that makes even a marginally compelling case for moving to XP. Of the top of my head the only change that is of note is how XP handles changes to group memberships (The gory details are that in the multimaster environment if person A is added to a group at DC1 and person B is removed from the same group later at DC2, but before the change had propogated from DC1 to DC2, this causes a conflict that is resolved by using the most recent change, which means neither A nor B are in the group after all the changes have replicated). This is a design flaw in how groups are stored and replicated in W2k (basically the group including all the members is replicated when changed in W2k, as opposed to deltas of the membership list which is how I think XP does it), but it isn't that hard to work around.
Did you fail to notice how it was last on the list?
No - that's why it's at the end.
I also find your comment about "struggling" through it disheartening.
Life must just be full of disappointments for you.
Perhaps you're not really a literary genius worthy of making these comments.
Never claimed to be a "literary genius". I maintain my right to critique books. For starters Tolkein did not consider the book completed, and anybody who has read it will agree that it isn't. The background is complete, but there is almost only background, which to me is very unsatisfying. Characterisation is negligible - never a Tolkien strong point - and I never emphathised with any of the characters. To give a scope of what is missing read the summary of the third age at the end of the book (which is LotR in about two pages). Comparing this summary to LotR is, I think, comparing what should have been written with the Silmarillion we actually got.
You must agree - you said yourself that it was last in the list, and by implication a lesser work.
" Offers a new prism through which to look at these works". Erm - trying to read though a prism will not be very productive.
Excuse me, Mr. Jackass - but it's called a metaphor. Try adding them to your writing sometime and see if it sounds better
No it isn't - metaphor is a comparison between unlike objects. When you read you look at a work so looking at a work through a prism isn't metaphorical, merely confused. A metaphor would have been something like "Offers a worthy new dish at the feast." assuming that it is a good book, of course.
Not that it particularly matters, but the standard of JKs writing is poor for a professional, particularly considering the weighty topics he chooses, and this broken metaphor was one of the better bad examples he has produced; a 50cc engine in a 10 tonne truck indeed.
"If you want to enter Tolkien's world, the best way is to tLotR, the Hobbit, and The Silmarillion." People do not read the Silmarillion - they struggle through it. Recommending it as an entry level book for Middle Earth is madness.
"For hard-core Tolkien lovers who have [already read the books]..": how can you be a hard-core fan without having read the books.
"[it's] well and clearly written, even for the casual fan". I can't figure out what this means - I think he is looking for understandable, but I could be wrong.
"Offers a new prism through which to look at these works". Erm - trying to read though a prism will not be very productive.
And, finally, the subtle nuance which separates the die-hard fan from the hard core fanatic is lost on me. Are these more or less fanatical than the hard-core Tolkien lovers?
Is anybody who read this any the wiser as to whether the book is worth buying?
Why is it that political or foreign-relations stories get all the responses with Bush-bashing and America-bashing?
I would like to have an accurate poll as to how many of these 'informed' slashdot posters actually voted. After all, I have found that the ones who complain the most do so since they didn't voice their opinion at the appropriate place and time; i.e. the polls.
p.s. 'i didnt like either candidate' is not a valid excuse; try again.
Is "I'm not American" a valid excuse?
Re:W e didn't loose anything, look at what we gain
on
The End of Innovation?
·
· Score: 2
Regional encoding is to protect copyright owners.
No. Regional encoding is to protect profits: nothing more and nothing less. Its only purpose is to allow the same product to be sold for different prices in different markets. A DVD that sells for $25 in the US may sell for the equivalent of $35 in the UK and $10 in the Far East.
This practice is thought by many (such as the large UK retailer Tescos) to be in breach a free trade, and should be banned by the WTO as a restraint of trade.
But think a bit more... all those pieces that can move forth and back again. They OBVIOUSLY creates an INFINITE amount of games, since they can move around and around and around.
A game is a draw is there have been no pawn moves and no captures for 50 moves each (except in special conditions). As pawns can only move forward there is a finite number of moves until all pawns must reach the eighth rank, at which point the game must end in fifty moves, or a piece must be taken. Then the maximum length of the game is (maximum number of pawn moves until last pawn reaches eighth rank * 50) + (50 * number of non-kings after last pawn is promoted).
The special condition mentioned above is where the game can go beyond 50 moves if there is known to be a forced win - King, Rook, and Bishop vs King and Two Knights can go on for 223 moves between captures.
Another way of looking at it is that there are only a finite number of legal chess positions. If any of these appear three times in one game then it is a draw (if you slightly generalise position to include potential moves from that position - pieces can be in the same position of the chess board but have different legal moves: en passant and castling are the two exmaples where this happens).
Hmm - I thought it was just me. I can't read aloud very well. If I read aloud a newspaper article or something similar then I manage to get across the essence of it, but a lot of the words will have changed.
It's as if I translate the words into whatever chunks I use for my mental processes, and then translate these back into words when I speak. Probably most people do the same, but I think that whatever I use for my chunks is probably a bit further from words than most people, and that from any of my chunks there is no clear way back to any specific word, hence the same meaning/different word type thing.
This is supported by my poor performance at things that require some verbal skills: I can write well, have a large vocabulary, but am often stumped by some of the word puzzles you get in IQ tests and the like. Things like "what word has the letter sequence 'WKW' in it?" and the like. I just don't think like that.
On the other hand the sort of puzzles you get where "next shape in the sequence" I find trivially easy.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with it. The article talks about the cameras on the back of buses as being to watch other cars but in fact they are to aid the driver when reversing and are not connected to anyone else.
No, this just is wrong. There are "Bus lane" cameras on buses, looking backwards, that exist to enforce the "no cars in bus lanes" rule.
But there is no island now known as England.
Personally I make sure that I can recover the system if it all goes wrong. Backups if necessary, splitting the mirror if it has mirrored system disks, that sort of thing. Reboot beforehand too, to get the machine in a known state.
Well, I'm going to patent prior art. Yes, I'll be rich!!!!
Maybe they'll think of pausing live video on the internet. Now that would surely be worth of a (seperate) patent. ;-)
Nah - a method of having live video not pause on the internet would be a winner.
Sorry - talking in jargon again. An oxygen fire is just a fire in an enriched oxygen atmosphere. Seems innocent, but things that don't normally burn (such as steel plate) will ignite. There is also a risk of spontaneous combustion of plastic and rubber if the percentage oxygen is high enough.
There are very difficult to put out because
a) it's hard to remove the fuel - steel plate will burn in these conditions (very hot, lots of oxygen)
b) it's hard to remove the source of ignition (as things are spontaneously combusting anyway)
c) It's hard to remove the oxygen (as there is so much of it)
There is a classic chemistry experiment with steel wool and liquid oxygen. First you try to set steel wool alight - it can be done but is smolders gently. Then you try setting steel wool that has been soaked in liquid oxygen alight - whoosh: looks like a magnesium flare going off.
The theory that I believe is that a torpedo exploded. This was not the warhead going off, but the oxidiser. The Russian navy use hydrogen peroxide as an oxidiser - it is run through a catalyser to produce oxygen and water. On its own it is extremely safe. The torpedo system was thought to be live (they were about to do some test firing so this is a good assumption) and this puts the peroxide under pressure. This is the normal state of affairs.
What happen now was that one of the pipes carrying the peroxide leaked and started spraying peroxide over the inside of the torpedo tube. All that's needed now for an explosion is a) the tube is reasonably air-tight (which is probably true) and b) that there is copper (one of the catalysts for the peroxide to oxygen reaction) available - these would usually be pipes carrying propellent.
The British Navy learned in the fifties (after a similar incident) that copper was bad, and most people that used the peroxide method had removed copper (and any other catalysts) from the torpedoes. The Russians, due to a combination of suspicion, N-I-H syndrome, and a misplaced belief in their engineering prowess, are thought to have left the copper pipes in.
At this state - after the oxidiser pipe has broken - you have a tube full of oxygen, electrics, and fuel (both the steel of the tube, the warhead, and the propellant). The pressure of the tube is also increasing rapidly. Then either the tube bursts through hydrostatic pressure, causing sparks and an oxygen fire, or a spark in the torpedo triggers an oxygen fire. Oxygen fires are very fierce, act like explosions, and are very difficult to extinguish. Add that the fire was in the forward torpedo room - full of fuel and munitions - you have a disaster.
So, what you are saying that Microsoft have made your life so difficult with their licensing policies that you are willing to give them even more money if they will stop hassling you?
Riiighttt.....
Does nothing strike you as just a little bit odd about this? If not, I can send some goons round your house to vaguely menace you until you give them some money to go away. For a while.
Cost, in a business, are two sorts - capital and operational. What Worldcom have done here is picked a business at a discount compared to the capital expediture they would be required to make to build the same business. A fire sale in other words.
I suspect this will actually be a fairly cheap endeavor, when compared to the capital and recurring expenditures DSL providers faced over the past few years
Now, the recurring cost will be a bit less for Worldcom compared with Rhythms but not by a huge margin (basically by the amount it takes to service the smaller debt, plus some from economies of scale). So I don't think that this will be a fairly cheap endevour to run. However, as the DSL market is undergoing a shakeout there will be less competition, and this will push user costs up.
The equation is a bit less opex, low capex for the infrastructure, and more revenue generated due to price increases (and, possibly, provision of low cost high margin services to a larger pool of users). Hopefully, opex+capex servicing+investment revenue, or it's goodbye DSL.
and I've been stuck behind british tourists trying to work out which U.S. note is which because they are not different colo(u)rs, don't ask me why,
.. but who cares)
Probably because the banknotes of every other country in the world are different colours. Most are also different sizes - this helps the blind and partial sighted distinguish notes. And probably because of lack of familiarity.
Different systems of bank note counting can also be confusing: when I was in Uzbekistan they had currency steps of 1 and 3 (so you get 1 cym notes, 3 cym notes, 10 cym notes, 30 cym notes and so on). This seems easy, but once I paid for a one cym beer (my first!) with a 10 cym note, and got three 3cym notes as change; I was just completely flummoxed - that part of my brain that did money just could not grasp the existance of a "three unit" note.
but stupity
That's "stupidity" - but I wonder if you get irony either.
(this isn't really the word to discribe people who aren't used to another currency or aren't used to ATMs
Uninformed is the word.
The informed.
Given that the human face recognition performed by the check-in agents did not keep the hijackers out, there is no reason to think that computer face recognition would help.
This does not make much sense. Generalising gives "Given that humans cannot do something means that computers cannot do it either" should explain. I really don't know what is meant here. We have something that is already happening poorly. Someone has suggested that using technology would improve it, and this is an infringement of civil liberties. Sorry, I just don't buy that argument.
Airlines have a right (and, de facto, an obligation, especially now) to know who is using them. Using computers can make their execution of this duty much more effective: it is counterproductive (to say the least), to demand that they forgo this because the use of this technology by some other body may infringe civil liberties.
It may be that the use of the same technology, for a different end, by a different body, will be an infringement of civil liberties: by all means fight that battle then. But to try to stop a technology that has beneficial uses because it also has bad uses is luddite.
And to fight the battle with the weapon "it's no better than what we've already got" is just dumb.
Maybe one day a president will get a brain tumor...
Surely not a concern with the current president?
I couldn't imagine even having 5-10 people on the same line and carrying on any kind of coherent conversations.
And this is different from a 10 person e-mail chain how, exactly?
Hmmmm. I've ben to the UK, and they are "ahead" in cell phones in as much as they are all GSM, no old analog system left (or maybe none was deployed, thus the quick uptake on the newer system). It was also nice that they run their GSM at about 900Mhz so it works through walls and plants and stuff way better then here. Land line phones didn't seem any more advanced. Did you notice differently?
GSM phones work at two frequencies - 900MHz and 1800MHz (the US is 1900MHz). There was a large analog infrastructure, but this has gone (or will be gone very shortly). The reasons for this have been rehashed here several times, but in the UK the caller pays for the call which has lead to something like >80% of the population with a mobile. Mobile numbers are obviously mobile numbers too - in the UK they start with 07, compared to 01 or 02 for land lines, and 08 and 09 for special rates (from free to expensive). In the US I believe that the owner of the cellphone has to pay a proportion if people call. I know the reasons, but it always comes as a surprise to Europeans when they find this out.
I'm not sure about landline phones either - I can't think of any obvious way that they are different. Ditto PDAs.
TV in the UK is available in widescreen (if you get digital signals via satellite or cable). I don't know if that is the case in the US.
Our pubs are infinitely more advanced, and so is the beer. How do you drink that stuff over there?
In XP you can roll back schema changes too, I've just remembered. This is nice, and may save a little bit of time during testing (rollback as opposed to rebuild), but won't impact a production environment.
Most of what you said I agree with but not "Of course, Microsoft will be kept afloat by the 'oh but this ones based on NT! It's stable!' fanboys out there, but anybody who has seen NT in action knows it's inadequacy on older hardware, and people are finally getting used to the idea that they don't really need the latest version of windows or the latest processor for what they do.
Firstly Joe Public probably only has the vaguest idea of what NT is, so there is limited mileage on the "based on NT" bandwagon.
Secondly NT is stable on older hardware - it's the more modern stuff that tends to trip it up (it really doesn't understand IR ports and USB very well). NT server on fairly standard hardware can easily have uptimes of more than a year (provided you don't and try and log on to the box - there is (or was - it may be fixed now) a memory leak in the GDI routines which breaks the explorer shell fairly terminally after about 6 months. All the services still work, but the box is a bit of a basket case if you need to do something interactive.
I'm not sure about people and new machines/OS. The machine I'm using now is triple boot box (Mandrake, Win98, W2K Advanced Server) with dual 350P2s and 256MB of ram. So fairly long in the tooth now. I've not seen anything that I want to do computer wise that I can't do on this box. So no reason to upgrade here. But I see lots of computers with a much higher spec being sold as the owner has upgraded to a more recent machine. What are these people doing with their machines?
So I think people may realise they don't need the new machine, but they still seem to want one. Then there is the monopoly leveraging that superwhizzy app only works on XP, to "encourage" people to upgrade to it.
and look at every windows release -- you'll see a huge group trying to fool themselves that 'THIS one will be good!'.
W2K was actually a good release. Probably too good. Having looked at XP from the server end (and particuarly the directory services bit of it, which is what I do at the moment) there is almost nothing that has changed that makes even a marginally compelling case for moving to XP. Of the top of my head the only change that is of note is how XP handles changes to group memberships (The gory details are that in the multimaster environment if person A is added to a group at DC1 and person B is removed from the same group later at DC2, but before the change had propogated from DC1 to DC2, this causes a conflict that is resolved by using the most recent change, which means neither A nor B are in the group after all the changes have replicated). This is a design flaw in how groups are stored and replicated in W2k (basically the group including all the members is replicated when changed in W2k, as opposed to deltas of the membership list which is how I think XP does it), but it isn't that hard to work around.
No - that's why it's at the end.
I also find your comment about "struggling" through it disheartening.
Life must just be full of disappointments for you.
Perhaps you're not really a literary genius worthy of making these comments.
Never claimed to be a "literary genius". I maintain my right to critique books. For starters Tolkein did not consider the book completed, and anybody who has read it will agree that it isn't. The background is complete, but there is almost only background, which to me is very unsatisfying. Characterisation is negligible - never a Tolkien strong point - and I never emphathised with any of the characters. To give a scope of what is missing read the summary of the third age at the end of the book (which is LotR in about two pages). Comparing this summary to LotR is, I think, comparing what should have been written with the Silmarillion we actually got.
You must agree - you said yourself that it was last in the list, and by implication a lesser work.
" Offers a new prism through which to look at these works". Erm - trying to read though a prism will not be very productive.
Excuse me, Mr. Jackass - but it's called a metaphor. Try adding them to your writing sometime and see if it sounds better
No it isn't - metaphor is a comparison between unlike objects. When you read you look at a work so looking at a work through a prism isn't metaphorical, merely confused. A metaphor would have been something like "Offers a worthy new dish at the feast." assuming that it is a good book, of course.
Not that it particularly matters, but the standard of JKs writing is poor for a professional, particularly considering the weighty topics he chooses, and this broken metaphor was one of the better bad examples he has produced; a 50cc engine in a 10 tonne truck indeed.
"If you want to enter Tolkien's world, the best way is to tLotR, the Hobbit, and The Silmarillion." People do not read the Silmarillion - they struggle through it. Recommending it as an entry level book for Middle Earth is madness.
"For hard-core Tolkien lovers who have [already read the books]..": how can you be a hard-core fan without having read the books.
"[it's] well and clearly written, even for the casual fan". I can't figure out what this means - I think he is looking for understandable, but I could be wrong.
"Offers a new prism through which to look at these works". Erm - trying to read though a prism will not be very productive.
And, finally, the subtle nuance which separates the die-hard fan from the hard core fanatic is lost on me. Are these more or less fanatical than the hard-core Tolkien lovers?
Is anybody who read this any the wiser as to whether the book is worth buying?
They've made a grave error here.
Touche
Is "I'm not American" a valid excuse?
No. Regional encoding is to protect profits: nothing more and nothing less. Its only purpose is to allow the same product to be sold for different prices in different markets. A DVD that sells for $25 in the US may sell for the equivalent of $35 in the UK and $10 in the Far East.
This practice is thought by many (such as the large UK retailer Tescos) to be in breach a free trade, and should be banned by the WTO as a restraint of trade.
A game is a draw is there have been no pawn moves and no captures for 50 moves each (except in special conditions). As pawns can only move forward there is a finite number of moves until all pawns must reach the eighth rank, at which point the game must end in fifty moves, or a piece must be taken. Then the maximum length of the game is (maximum number of pawn moves until last pawn reaches eighth rank * 50) + (50 * number of non-kings after last pawn is promoted).
The special condition mentioned above is where the game can go beyond 50 moves if there is known to be a forced win - King, Rook, and Bishop vs King and Two Knights can go on for 223 moves between captures.
Another way of looking at it is that there are only a finite number of legal chess positions. If any of these appear three times in one game then it is a draw (if you slightly generalise position to include potential moves from that position - pieces can be in the same position of the chess board but have different legal moves: en passant and castling are the two exmaples where this happens).
It's as if I translate the words into whatever chunks I use for my mental processes, and then translate these back into words when I speak. Probably most people do the same, but I think that whatever I use for my chunks is probably a bit further from words than most people, and that from any of my chunks there is no clear way back to any specific word, hence the same meaning/different word type thing.
This is supported by my poor performance at things that require some verbal skills: I can write well, have a large vocabulary, but am often stumped by some of the word puzzles you get in IQ tests and the like. Things like "what word has the letter sequence 'WKW' in it?" and the like. I just don't think like that.
On the other hand the sort of puzzles you get where "next shape in the sequence" I find trivially easy.
Oh - and the word is "awkward".