In my experience, usually if either site gets an article before the other, it will be at Digg first. However, I am always glad when an interesting article I read at Digg shows up later on Slashdot, because that means I know I will get some great comments and interesting threads.
I don't really see what's so bad about this. It's there, and maybe you get around to watching it and maybe you don't.
One positive thing that I have noticed since I started Netflix is that I watch a lot less movies that I *don't* care about much. Back when I used to go to the video store, I might have a few movies in mind, and maybe these movies would be in, or not, or maybe I remember my mental list, or maybe not. But at that point, I've driven to the video store, so I'm leaving with at least one movie. So, I spend 45 minutes to finally decide on something that I don't even care about, just so my trip wasn't a total loss.
Sorry, I should have clarified... those auditory and visual cues--along with context--work to convey meaning. My point is that the extra auditory and visual cues during speech compensate for the missing written cues. Removing the written cues in text that are encoded in the spelling, without adding in the auditory or visual cues somehow, just leads to a more ambiguous and more difficult language to understand to the reader (with the benefit of being easier to write and pronounce).
The way to bring back the germanic identity of the language would be to promote words like:
ox -> oxen man -> men mouse -> mice
German has the least consistent pluralization I have ever seen. Mann becomes Maenner, Frau becomes Frauen, Hut becomes Huete, Arbeiter becomes (remains) Arbeiter. Those are some of the main patterns, but there are more.
Actually, it is "Bostonian". Every city has one generally accepted name for the people of the city. Despite what you claim, yes, there is a word. These words have in many cases existed and been used regularly for hundreds of years, so I'm wondering, what does a word have to do to actually be valid in your eyes? Evey word had to be made up at some point.
I could understand your complaint if people from Boston were called "Yarkenfargers" or something, but in this case, words like Bostonian, New Yorker, Pennsylvanian, etc. are concise and intuitive to whoever hears it.
Yes, instead of saying "New Yorkers", one could say "people from New York" every time. Likewise, instead of saying "northerner", one could say "people from the north", and instead of saying "orwellian", we could just say "in a manner similar to that portrayed in the works of George Orwell". How are these examples any more valid as words than ones that describe inhabitants of a place?
The only reason everybody doesn't know the name for someone from every city is because they don't have to; it doesn't come up. If you live in San Francisco, you aren't talking about Bostonians very much at all, you are talking about Californians and Oregonians. But for people who live in the New England area, the word "Bostonian" comes up quite often!
Similarly, those who aren't in the medical field might not know all the terminology a doctor uses, but the words are still quite useful to doctors on a daily basis.
In short, get over it. In terms of longevity, these are much more firmly established words than, say, "computer" or "airplane" or "light switch". They are real words. Just deal. At least these words convey something meaningful.
I have an account on myspace, and, although you are probably right about some people's reason for using the site, I don't use it that way. I use it to get in touch/keep in touch with friends who don't live near me anymore. Most of my friends whom I am in touch with seem to be using it in the same way. Nobody on my friends list is anybody I didn't already know personally. It's an easy way to see what someone is up to, and to keep in touch with them. Back before these sites, I would try to hang on to people's email addresses, or I would look it up on the school directories that always seemed to be out of date. Now, we connect up and it doesn't matter if anyone moves or changes their contact info. They are still in myspace and connected to me. Since it is so popular and so easy, it means that the information is actually useful/current.
I don't put a whole bunch of personal info, just a few fun/humorous things, a current picture, and what I am currently doing. To me, it's worth it.
In the Network section of your System Prefereces, there is a place to move around the Wi-Fi network priority list. You can tell it to join the last one you were on, or the one closest to the top of the list (you could even remove your neighbor's network from the list completely), or to just join one precise network and don't look for anything else.
Try messing around there and see if you solve the problem.
All you did, as far as I can see, is attach an opinion about each fact that the GP presented. Your comments did not in any way refute that his statements were facts. And that was his whole point, I think.
You'd probably have better luck just filtering out URLs with any dirty words in them. If you had this law and you filtered on.xxx, you're only going to get sites that are under the US jurisdiction or decided they wanted to jump into the.xxx domain. I wouldn't be shocked if you ended up with only 10% of porn sites blocked in this manner. There is a lot of porn outside the US, and many US sites would probably move offshore if it was needed because of the laws.
Then you get into the even messier question of determining who needs to be under this domain. First, are you going to force people to give up their domain if they already had it before this law? How are you going to decide what is considered porn or not? If I have an art e-store, and one of the images has a fully naked woman, do I now have to move my entire store to a.xxx domain and be filtered out by every public place (and possibly by many ISPs)?
That is so absolutely not the answer, not only would it help but I think it would actually make things much worse.
Well, my central aim was humor; I know it doesn't get quite as absurd as all the cases I listed.
I still don't feel like I have ever gotten an explanation of why, for example, "company" and "band" qualify as things to be treated as plurals (even though you can have "a band" and "one company"), but "town", for example, doesn't qualify. What would be the criteria that one fits into and the other doesn't?
And actually, I shouldn't have said "collective" nouns at all, I should have said "mass" nouns, because that is what we are actually talking about here.
Don't you see? It's too little too late. You were an asshole from the get-go, so I'm not interested in engaging in any sort of useful discussion with you. Your words are all out there in cyberspace already. Perhaps in Oz the word "ignorant" isn't incredibly insulting? I mean, I wouldn't want to just assume the word has the same meaning there as it has here.
I'll bet you don't like being mistakenly called an Austrian, or to have people think that you ride a kangaroo to work at the boomerang factory every day. Well, I don't like being called an ignorant American if I ever make a mistake (particularly one that I imagine would be easily overlooked if I were from any other country).
Perhaps you should have checked to see if NZ was part of the Australian continent *before* posting? Then maybe I would not have considered you ignorant.
Think of this analogy. Imagine if Australians were known to be clumsy people who didn't look where they were going. Now everybody trips and stumbles now and again, even those who take great care to watch where they are going. But imagine if people from other countries just relished at the chance of catching you making the slightest tripup so they could say "Ah, you must be Australian! Why don't you learn to walk?" Now, why should you buy better shoes just to please those jerks?
Honestly, if I you are having to do research for sources, and depending on where you look there are different answers, and depending on if you are looking politically, geographically, or geologically, it can be defined differently, and even you, an Australian, aren't 100% totally certain, don't you think it is going a teensy weensy bit far to say that I am being ignorant, or that I am speaking without thinking?
I know there are a lot of Americans who embarrass me a great deal, and I'm not perfect myself, but I think it is very fair to say that I have gone out of my way to learn about many cultures in the world. I am a linguistics Ph.D. student who used to live in Germany, and I speak 5 languages. No, that doesn't mean I'm anything special or that I know everything, but it does maybe mean I am extremely interested in the world and I am interested always learning every day. If you actually wanted to educate me instead of being an asshole, I would have been very interested in the discussion, and you would have had one less person who was confused about your confusing geographical layout. In fact, I probably would have been one of the more interested people you could have happened upon.
From what I see, the argument isn't exactly like wthat. I didn't see it as a "violence is way worse and gets away with it, so why not sex" kind of thing. To me, it is more like, "sex isn't even bad at all, but not only are you going after sex, you also are *not* going after the violence, which actually *is* bad". I think bringing up the violence at all is to illustrate just how far out of whack the US system of (legal) morality is.
New Guinea is a part of Australia WITHOUT being connected, Japan is a part of Asia, Asia and Europe are separate continents DESPITE the fact that they are very much connected (and Russia is in both continents), and the same is true of North and South America, both are connected. So, tell me, why would the fact that New Zealand is a fair distance away from Australia, but still closer to it than any other continent (and also grouped into Oceania), imply that as an American I have never bothered to look at a map? Yes, only an ignorant and self-centered American could make such a preposterous mistake.
So in conclusion, I'm so incredibly sorry that I didn't realize that New Zealand didn't happen to be arbitrarily designated as a part of the Australian continent, seeing that the criteria are so clearly defined. Yes, I can understand why you would instantly look down your nose at me based on where I was born.
It is illogical and inconsistent, however. Everything is made up of smaller parts, and the line is drawn totally arbitrarily. To me, it leads to perceptual and logical confusion.
Do the British say "my hair are too long" and "the grass are growing"? Because those are both collective nouns as well (and dear god, I hope they don't actually say the two examples I mentioned).
Do the British say "my outfit sure look nice"? An outfit is made up of a shirt, pants/skirt, belt, hat, etc. So it should be plural, shouldn't it?
Or is it that there must be a number of people? A company has many people so it is plural... what if the president fires everyone and runs the company by himself? Does the company then become singular?
What about a handshake? That requires two human hands, doesn't it? That is, unless two monkeys shake hands. Maybe it is the number of living things that decide if something is plural.
The Earth are round, right? Because the Earth has billions of people, animals, trees, a bunch of water... and let's not forget that the ocean are full of fish (among other things), so that should be plural too, maybe.
Are towns treated as plural? (I honestly don't know.) A town have multiple people in it, so I would think it should be done that way, logically speaking. Of course, what about a ghost town? Is that now singular, or is it, perhaps, the number of of houses or traffic lights that causes it to be treated as a plural?
Or... maybe we can just say that if there is one of something, it is singular, no matter what it is made up of. I like that idea.
Are you talking about me or are you agreeing with me? Because my whole point was to make fun of the "semantics shit" that the original post pulled when they said that referring to themsleves as "Americans" was a symptom of the USA's self-centered attitude.
Is that really true that it isn't considered part of Australia? That is interesting, I really didn't know that. In that case, replace "New Zealand" with "Papua New Guinea" and then the example works.
Tell me, where is "America"? We have the Americas, which are North America and South America. Neither of these is, simply, "America". The inhabitants are North Americans and South Americans. If someone says they are South American, people don't think they mean they are from Texas. Well, an idiot might, but if you told an idiot you were from the UK but not from England they would be equally confused.
On the other hand, we do have this place called "The United States of America". That's the name; that's all there is. What should someone from The United States of America be called, if not Americans? United States of Americans? Citizens of the USA? Uniteds? The "America" part of the name is really the only unique part of the country's name. Yes, there are other parts of the world which have "America" in the name. There are also other countries that have states, and other countries which are united. I wish the name could have been something awesome and unique like Kickassland, but unfortunately we're all stuck with what it is.
To shorten The United States of America to "America" is only as far-fetched as shortening, say, the German Democratic Republic to "Germany". This is very commonly done. Most people don't know what every other country's "real" name is.
Also, I don't see anyone getting up in arms about Australians calling themselves such, even though New Zealanders are also from the continent of Australia.
While I would even agree that USA-natives have a limited view of the world in many cases, and I don't like a lot of things going on in the country, I honestly wonder what in the world you expected Americans of the United and Stately Variety to call themselves. Of all the examples of self-centered and ignorant acts by Portion-of-North-Americans, how is this a good or fair example?
(Beyond that, the USA participated in the dang World Baseball Classic this year, which Japan won and where the USA was knocked out by Cuba, so I think it is fair to say that the country is aware that the World Series is simply an archaic, but traditional, name with lots of history and sentimentality attached to it.)
Actually, you have named some extremely good examples of words that have been misused a great deal in recent years because of their imprecise meaning.
Take "freedom" for example. Did our invasion of Iraq bring "freedom" to the Iraqi people? Is the US really the land of "freedom"? Just what are "freedom fighters", if the very same group of people who had that label in the 80s are the ones who supposedly "hate us for our freedom" now? This word has an automatic positive undertone to it in America. Who doesn't like "freedom" after all? So you attach the word to things like "Operation Iraqi Freedom", and who is going to say it is bad?
What exactly makes this word any more useful than corporate BS, and what makes a word like this more important than those which would accurately describe the people and situations in question?
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, usually if either site gets an article before the other, it will be at Digg first. However, I am always glad when an interesting article I read at Digg shows up later on Slashdot, because that means I know I will get some great comments and interesting threads.
Particularly so when they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia.
No, I think that sums it up pretty well most of the time.
I don't really see what's so bad about this. It's there, and maybe you get around to watching it and maybe you don't.
One positive thing that I have noticed since I started Netflix is that I watch a lot less movies that I *don't* care about much. Back when I used to go to the video store, I might have a few movies in mind, and maybe these movies would be in, or not, or maybe I remember my mental list, or maybe not. But at that point, I've driven to the video store, so I'm leaving with at least one movie. So, I spend 45 minutes to finally decide on something that I don't even care about, just so my trip wasn't a total loss.
Sorry, I should have clarified... those auditory and visual cues--along with context--work to convey meaning. My point is that the extra auditory and visual cues during speech compensate for the missing written cues. Removing the written cues in text that are encoded in the spelling, without adding in the auditory or visual cues somehow, just leads to a more ambiguous and more difficult language to understand to the reader (with the benefit of being easier to write and pronounce).
The way to bring back the germanic identity of the language would be to promote words like:
ox -> oxen
man -> men
mouse -> mice
German has the least consistent pluralization I have ever seen. Mann becomes Maenner, Frau becomes Frauen, Hut becomes Huete, Arbeiter becomes (remains) Arbeiter. Those are some of the main patterns, but there are more.
A: Tempo, volume, tone, stresses, visual cues, filler sounds, etc. that are not encoded in written speech.
Actually, it is "Bostonian". Every city has one generally accepted name for the people of the city. Despite what you claim, yes, there is a word. These words have in many cases existed and been used regularly for hundreds of years, so I'm wondering, what does a word have to do to actually be valid in your eyes? Evey word had to be made up at some point.
I could understand your complaint if people from Boston were called "Yarkenfargers" or something, but in this case, words like Bostonian, New Yorker, Pennsylvanian, etc. are concise and intuitive to whoever hears it.
Yes, instead of saying "New Yorkers", one could say "people from New York" every time. Likewise, instead of saying "northerner", one could say "people from the north", and instead of saying "orwellian", we could just say "in a manner similar to that portrayed in the works of George Orwell". How are these examples any more valid as words than ones that describe inhabitants of a place?
The only reason everybody doesn't know the name for someone from every city is because they don't have to; it doesn't come up. If you live in San Francisco, you aren't talking about Bostonians very much at all, you are talking about Californians and Oregonians. But for people who live in the New England area, the word "Bostonian" comes up quite often!
Similarly, those who aren't in the medical field might not know all the terminology a doctor uses, but the words are still quite useful to doctors on a daily basis.
In short, get over it. In terms of longevity, these are much more firmly established words than, say, "computer" or "airplane" or "light switch". They are real words. Just deal. At least these words convey something meaningful.
I have an account on myspace, and, although you are probably right about some people's reason for using the site, I don't use it that way. I use it to get in touch/keep in touch with friends who don't live near me anymore. Most of my friends whom I am in touch with seem to be using it in the same way. Nobody on my friends list is anybody I didn't already know personally. It's an easy way to see what someone is up to, and to keep in touch with them. Back before these sites, I would try to hang on to people's email addresses, or I would look it up on the school directories that always seemed to be out of date. Now, we connect up and it doesn't matter if anyone moves or changes their contact info. They are still in myspace and connected to me. Since it is so popular and so easy, it means that the information is actually useful/current.
I don't put a whole bunch of personal info, just a few fun/humorous things, a current picture, and what I am currently doing. To me, it's worth it.
In the Network section of your System Prefereces, there is a place to move around the Wi-Fi network priority list. You can tell it to join the last one you were on, or the one closest to the top of the list (you could even remove your neighbor's network from the list completely), or to just join one precise network and don't look for anything else.
Try messing around there and see if you solve the problem.
All you did, as far as I can see, is attach an opinion about each fact that the GP presented. Your comments did not in any way refute that his statements were facts. And that was his whole point, I think.
You'd probably have better luck just filtering out URLs with any dirty words in them. If you had this law and you filtered on .xxx, you're only going to get sites that are under the US jurisdiction or decided they wanted to jump into the .xxx domain. I wouldn't be shocked if you ended up with only 10% of porn sites blocked in this manner. There is a lot of porn outside the US, and many US sites would probably move offshore if it was needed because of the laws.
.xxx domain and be filtered out by every public place (and possibly by many ISPs)?
Then you get into the even messier question of determining who needs to be under this domain. First, are you going to force people to give up their domain if they already had it before this law? How are you going to decide what is considered porn or not? If I have an art e-store, and one of the images has a fully naked woman, do I now have to move my entire store to a
That is so absolutely not the answer, not only would it help but I think it would actually make things much worse.
Well, my central aim was humor; I know it doesn't get quite as absurd as all the cases I listed.
I still don't feel like I have ever gotten an explanation of why, for example, "company" and "band" qualify as things to be treated as plurals (even though you can have "a band" and "one company"), but "town", for example, doesn't qualify. What would be the criteria that one fits into and the other doesn't?
And actually, I shouldn't have said "collective" nouns at all, I should have said "mass" nouns, because that is what we are actually talking about here.
I'll bet you don't like being mistakenly called an Austrian, or to have people think that you ride a kangaroo to work at the boomerang factory every day. Well, I don't like being called an ignorant American if I ever make a mistake (particularly one that I imagine would be easily overlooked if I were from any other country).
Think of this analogy. Imagine if Australians were known to be clumsy people who didn't look where they were going. Now everybody trips and stumbles now and again, even those who take great care to watch where they are going. But imagine if people from other countries just relished at the chance of catching you making the slightest tripup so they could say "Ah, you must be Australian! Why don't you learn to walk?" Now, why should you buy better shoes just to please those jerks?
Honestly, if I you are having to do research for sources, and depending on where you look there are different answers, and depending on if you are looking politically, geographically, or geologically, it can be defined differently, and even you, an Australian, aren't 100% totally certain, don't you think it is going a teensy weensy bit far to say that I am being ignorant, or that I am speaking without thinking?
I know there are a lot of Americans who embarrass me a great deal, and I'm not perfect myself, but I think it is very fair to say that I have gone out of my way to learn about many cultures in the world. I am a linguistics Ph.D. student who used to live in Germany, and I speak 5 languages. No, that doesn't mean I'm anything special or that I know everything, but it does maybe mean I am extremely interested in the world and I am interested always learning every day. If you actually wanted to educate me instead of being an asshole, I would have been very interested in the discussion, and you would have had one less person who was confused about your confusing geographical layout. In fact, I probably would have been one of the more interested people you could have happened upon.
Oh well.
The end.
More people would consider it extremely ignorant to claim that the USA has 52 states.
From what I see, the argument isn't exactly like wthat. I didn't see it as a "violence is way worse and gets away with it, so why not sex" kind of thing. To me, it is more like, "sex isn't even bad at all, but not only are you going after sex, you also are *not* going after the violence, which actually *is* bad". I think bringing up the violence at all is to illustrate just how far out of whack the US system of (legal) morality is.
New Guinea is a part of Australia WITHOUT being connected, Japan is a part of Asia, Asia and Europe are separate continents DESPITE the fact that they are very much connected (and Russia is in both continents), and the same is true of North and South America, both are connected. So, tell me, why would the fact that New Zealand is a fair distance away from Australia, but still closer to it than any other continent (and also grouped into Oceania), imply that as an American I have never bothered to look at a map? Yes, only an ignorant and self-centered American could make such a preposterous mistake.
So in conclusion, I'm so incredibly sorry that I didn't realize that New Zealand didn't happen to be arbitrarily designated as a part of the Australian continent, seeing that the criteria are so clearly defined. Yes, I can understand why you would instantly look down your nose at me based on where I was born.
It is illogical and inconsistent, however. Everything is made up of smaller parts, and the line is drawn totally arbitrarily. To me, it leads to perceptual and logical confusion.
Do the British say "my hair are too long" and "the grass are growing"? Because those are both collective nouns as well (and dear god, I hope they don't actually say the two examples I mentioned).
Do the British say "my outfit sure look nice"? An outfit is made up of a shirt, pants/skirt, belt, hat, etc. So it should be plural, shouldn't it?
Or is it that there must be a number of people? A company has many people so it is plural... what if the president fires everyone and runs the company by himself? Does the company then become singular?
What about a handshake? That requires two human hands, doesn't it? That is, unless two monkeys shake hands. Maybe it is the number of living things that decide if something is plural.
The Earth are round, right? Because the Earth has billions of people, animals, trees, a bunch of water... and let's not forget that the ocean are full of fish (among other things), so that should be plural too, maybe.
Are towns treated as plural? (I honestly don't know.) A town have multiple people in it, so I would think it should be done that way, logically speaking. Of course, what about a ghost town? Is that now singular, or is it, perhaps, the number of of houses or traffic lights that causes it to be treated as a plural?
Or... maybe we can just say that if there is one of something, it is singular, no matter what it is made up of. I like that idea.
Okay, then I guess I wasted my time replying to you. My apologies.
Did you really think I would reply with a new country and not double-check this time?
As a matter of fact, I'm right on this one.
Are you talking about me or are you agreeing with me? Because my whole point was to make fun of the "semantics shit" that the original post pulled when they said that referring to themsleves as "Americans" was a symptom of the USA's self-centered attitude.
Is that really true that it isn't considered part of Australia? That is interesting, I really didn't know that. In that case, replace "New Zealand" with "Papua New Guinea" and then the example works.
Tell me, where is "America"? We have the Americas, which are North America and South America. Neither of these is, simply, "America". The inhabitants are North Americans and South Americans. If someone says they are South American, people don't think they mean they are from Texas. Well, an idiot might, but if you told an idiot you were from the UK but not from England they would be equally confused.
On the other hand, we do have this place called "The United States of America". That's the name; that's all there is. What should someone from The United States of America be called, if not Americans? United States of Americans? Citizens of the USA? Uniteds? The "America" part of the name is really the only unique part of the country's name. Yes, there are other parts of the world which have "America" in the name. There are also other countries that have states, and other countries which are united. I wish the name could have been something awesome and unique like Kickassland, but unfortunately we're all stuck with what it is.
To shorten The United States of America to "America" is only as far-fetched as shortening, say, the German Democratic Republic to "Germany". This is very commonly done. Most people don't know what every other country's "real" name is.
Also, I don't see anyone getting up in arms about Australians calling themselves such, even though New Zealanders are also from the continent of Australia.
While I would even agree that USA-natives have a limited view of the world in many cases, and I don't like a lot of things going on in the country, I honestly wonder what in the world you expected Americans of the United and Stately Variety to call themselves. Of all the examples of self-centered and ignorant acts by Portion-of-North-Americans, how is this a good or fair example?
(Beyond that, the USA participated in the dang World Baseball Classic this year, which Japan won and where the USA was knocked out by Cuba, so I think it is fair to say that the country is aware that the World Series is simply an archaic, but traditional, name with lots of history and sentimentality attached to it.)
Actually, you have named some extremely good examples of words that have been misused a great deal in recent years because of their imprecise meaning.
Take "freedom" for example. Did our invasion of Iraq bring "freedom" to the Iraqi people? Is the US really the land of "freedom"? Just what are "freedom fighters", if the very same group of people who had that label in the 80s are the ones who supposedly "hate us for our freedom" now? This word has an automatic positive undertone to it in America. Who doesn't like "freedom" after all? So you attach the word to things like "Operation Iraqi Freedom", and who is going to say it is bad?
What exactly makes this word any more useful than corporate BS, and what makes a word like this more important than those which would accurately describe the people and situations in question?