The largest any flying animal can get is about 40 pounds. Anything around that size - like the California condor - spends a lot of time gliding.
Land animals and humans were created on the same day.
How interesting then, that we have no dinosaurs with spear marks on them or dinosaur bones buried with broken spear heads, unlike those creatures which evolutionists believed lived along side man.
the skeptic's position often turns out to be wrong
Not really. For every platypus and meteorite, there are a hundred hoaxes. Any true skeptic is always open to information.
Can you conclusively prove to me, right here and now, beyond ANY shadow of doubt, that things like UFOs, ghosts, Nessie, etc. do NOT exist?
Can you prove to me that there isn't a 80-ton purple furred monster standing right behind you, but is so silent and quick that you never notice him? Can you prove to me that the inside of your computer is filled with tiny ants doing the computation, that project the illusion of computer parts when you open up the computer?
Did you forget the big wings, breathes fire, coexisted with humans part?
Might griffins and unicorns be extinct species?
Griffins? There's no way you could have a flying lion. Simple lift calculations prohibit it (the same lift calculations that get thousands of airplanes in the air everyday.)
Is it possible that unicorns are extinct species? Sure. But it's possible the pushme-pullme is an extinct species. In either case, it'd be nice to see just the least bit of hard evidence.
In 1799, the platypus was first described by a British scientist, Dr George Shaw.
Why was he a fool? Come on, he probably got a dozen of these type of things a week. Was he supposed to believe in every furred fish and other bizzare creature that went across his desk? He responded in exactly the correct way - he took the time to investigate the reality of what he was faced with when faced with doubts, instead of trumpeting it to the stars everytime someone tossed a hoax across his desk.
it's a regional chain coffee shop complaining that Wal-Mart was installing coffee shops
So a cartel made up of Sony, Toshiba, GE, Samsung, Sharp and Microsoft (among others) is equivelent to a regional chain coffee shop? They build half of the camcorders and other hardware, so Microsoft certainly doesn't have a monopoly on the hardware side of the equation. This is the big guys fighting out.
the close-mindedness of that piece is wonderfully hilarious! I'm getting tired of seeing Kernighan's paper cited. Of *course* the developer of a competing language doesn't like his competition!
Have you ever read the paper? I read it after learning Pascal in school, and found very true. It's not true of the mile of hacks built on standard Pascal that modern Pascals are, but it's very accurate about standard Pascal, which is torture to program in.
And bad in others: there's no standard beyond the most basic, and pretty much anything you write will be compiler-specific. Standard Pascal has all the lack of functionality of C without the direct hardware control of C. The Extended Pascal standard is ironically compiler specific - only GPC implements it, to the best of my knowledge.
Mozilla fails even the most rudimentary usability tests because of its speed (or lack thereof).
I'm using it here on Windows ME, on a Pentium II with 64 MB of RAM. The box crawls. After closing everything, the System Moniter tells me there's 184 MB of RAM used. Opening a directory can be a painfully slow thing. But I've never had problems with Mozilla's speed. If you're comparing it to 4 year old software, I suggest you upgrade and compare apples to apples.
We all agree that piracy isn't a good thing, but I'd like to think the P2P is viable even without copyright infringement.
It's anonymous - by its nature, you don't know who is on the other end. I sure as heck won't be downloading programs from it anytime soon.
It's unreliable - what's on the network can vary from where you are on the net, and can change at any moment.
There's no quality control - there are a lot of files out there with bad names, and a lot of names for some files. It's easy to waste hours downloading a file and find that it's not what it says.
I have the option of going to Project Gutenberg or P2P for Tom Saywer - why should I waste my time trying to fish it out of P2P? I have the option of going to Debian or P2P for Exim - why on Earth would I risk a trojan by pulling it off P2P?
I would distinguish them on the basis that MBCS character representations are not of a fixed size, whereas in any usual representation of the Unicode character set, a character at least occupies a fixed number of bytes.
Any usual representation? Only UTF-32 has fixed width characters; a large set of uncommon UTF-16 characters are four bytes long, and a UTF-8 character can take anywhere from one byte to four.
Unicode is a MBCS, and is entirely suitable for Japanese. You have to set up input and output filters (using iconv or some similar application) for the locale charset, just like any other locale. If you use GTK or Qt or Java, you don't have an option - you can use Unicode without much problem, and can't use other charsets.
If you use GTK, it will automatically flip dialog boxes R-to-L. As for vertical presentation - who's doing vertical presentation? I don't know of anyone who supports vertical presentation on dialog boxes; the Chinese, who traditionally write vertically, are happy with L-to-R in a computer situation, and the Mongolians, the only other people I know of who write vertically, tend to use Cyrillic or at least write traditional Mongolian horizontally in a computer situation. With all due respect to the Mongolians, if they're the only people who may use vertical writing systems in computers, I don't think vertical presentation is the most important thing to worry about.
You don't have to rewrite the world; a lot of this stuff's already been done in the standard toolkits.
I suppose if we want more translators to help us out, we need a similar tool for po files - any volunteers for hacking up Qt Linguist to support both formats?
It seems wrong to say Qt Linguist versus gettext; how do KBable and GTranslator compare to Qt Linguist?
Computational Linguistics is the BIG growth area, and it seems that Microsoft isn't going to miss the party.
It's been the big growth area for 40 years now; translation is fundamentally equal to the hard AI problem. Getting even moderately decent technical translation is very hard, and doesn't look to be getting easy anytime soon. I'm sure they can produce something better then what we have, but with the amount of work thrown at the problem already, I don't expect miracles.
Most people would also be surprised to know that the largest english speaking country is China.
Not in any meaningful sense. Chinese speak Chinese to each other. Even if over 25% of the Chinese population speaks some English, that doesn't mean they speak fluent English, or that they could read or write something of moderate complexity without a dictionary.
America makes up a very small part of the total english speaking world.
Well, America makes up almost 300 million people. Even assuming everyone in the world speaks English, that's still 5%; and while a lot of the world speaks English, a country aren't really part of the "english speaking world" until they primarily speak and write English. So Australia, New Zealand, U.K., Ireland, U.S., Canada, and to some extent India and Africa. Of the solidly English speaking countries, the U.S. is the largest.
What is the usefulness of anonymous communication? I can't see any. Only a way for troublemakers to cause trouble.
I'm quite sure that Hitler or Stalin, or the American British circa the 1770's would have agreed with you; it would be so much easier to crack down on dissidents that way. I guess you'd like to do away with anonymous voting, too; if 'troublemakers' need to have their every word scrutinized, why should their votes escape scrutiny?
So the government would have to pay for it--which means we'd have to pay for it. My taxes would end up paying for a cell deep in the Ozarks that nobody wants or needs or cares about.
Why do you think that nobody needs it? There's people living in up in them there hills. We as a society decided that every American would have water, and electricity and phone service - it probably still wouldn't be feasible to run those to some places. What's the problem with everyone in America being able to communicate from anywhere in America? Just the comfort of knowing you can communicate without worry anywhere is one great advantage.
No longer getting mocked by Finns who can get cell coverage anywhere in Finland is another, of course.
Somehow, I have a feeling William Scarboro would be happier with a $1 donation for the source code to his family than a free giveaway of one of his greatest works.
Is this because you knew him personally, and think that is what he would want? Is his family in poor straits? Or are you second-guessing people who worked with him without having any actual knowledge of the situation?
Defense lawyers generally don't roll over when confronted with things like that. I'd expect that before the trial was over, the jury would hear all about the possible problems.
Well, gee, then we should just let anything in. Not everybody has O.J.'s defense lawyers, and even with the best defense lawyers, an "expert" can be a pretty condemning thing, no matter what a defense lawyer (sleezy scumbag defending murderers) says.
Strafing around corners isn't actually that bad an idea, so you can see if someone is going to run into you.
Yeah, well, one of my friends tried strafing around a corner while running around in the dorm. It turns out you need some dexterity to do that; I understand the high speed impact with the wall was not very comfortable.
You must think that the justice system is full of idiots. I'm sure that this "new" fingerprint is going to hold up against the old fingerprint really well.
Erasing it was the extreme example, but one of the big problems with our justice system is "experts" spewing nonsense and juries buying it. If a fingerprint expert gives us an extremely-blurry before and a clear after, most juries are going to accept the change on his word, unless it's totally wrong. The jury is not likely to be packed with fingerprint experts; they won't know what was significant in the original and what was just noise. Is that swirl part of the original design, or did the object turn while the perp was holding it?
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The largest any flying animal can get is about 40 pounds. Anything around that size - like the California condor - spends a lot of time gliding.
Land animals and humans were created on the same day.
How interesting then, that we have no dinosaurs with spear marks on them or dinosaur bones buried with broken spear heads, unlike those creatures which evolutionists believed lived along side man.
the skeptic's position often turns out to be wrong
Not really. For every platypus and meteorite, there are a hundred hoaxes. Any true skeptic is always open to information.
Can you conclusively prove to me, right here and now, beyond ANY shadow of doubt, that things like UFOs, ghosts, Nessie, etc. do NOT exist?
Can you prove to me that there isn't a 80-ton purple furred monster standing right behind you, but is so silent and quick that you never notice him? Can you prove to me that the inside of your computer is filled with tiny ants doing the computation, that project the illusion of computer parts when you open up the computer?
what is a dragon but a dinosaur?
Did you forget the big wings, breathes fire, coexisted with humans part?
Might griffins and unicorns be extinct species?
Griffins? There's no way you could have a flying lion. Simple lift calculations prohibit it (the same lift calculations that get thousands of airplanes in the air everyday.)
Is it possible that unicorns are extinct species? Sure. But it's possible the pushme-pullme is an extinct species. In either case, it'd be nice to see just the least bit of hard evidence.
In 1799, the platypus was first described by a British scientist, Dr George Shaw.
Why was he a fool? Come on, he probably got a dozen of these type of things a week. Was he supposed to believe in every furred fish and other bizzare creature that went across his desk? He responded in exactly the correct way - he took the time to investigate the reality of what he was faced with when faced with doubts, instead of trumpeting it to the stars everytime someone tossed a hoax across his desk.
it's a regional chain coffee shop complaining that Wal-Mart was installing coffee shops
So a cartel made up of Sony, Toshiba, GE, Samsung, Sharp and Microsoft (among others) is equivelent to a regional chain coffee shop? They build half of the camcorders and other hardware, so Microsoft certainly doesn't have a monopoly on the hardware side of the equation. This is the big guys fighting out.
the close-mindedness of that piece is wonderfully hilarious! I'm getting tired of seeing Kernighan's paper cited. Of *course* the developer of a competing language doesn't like his competition!
Have you ever read the paper? I read it after learning Pascal in school, and found very true. It's not true of the mile of hacks built on standard Pascal that modern Pascals are, but it's very accurate about standard Pascal, which is torture to program in.
Pascal is good in some areas:
And bad in others: there's no standard beyond the most basic, and pretty much anything you write will be compiler-specific. Standard Pascal has all the lack of functionality of C without the direct hardware control of C. The Extended Pascal standard is ironically compiler specific - only GPC implements it, to the best of my knowledge.
Mozilla fails even the most rudimentary usability tests because of its speed (or lack thereof).
I'm using it here on Windows ME, on a Pentium II with 64 MB of RAM. The box crawls. After closing everything, the System Moniter tells me there's 184 MB of RAM used. Opening a directory can be a painfully slow thing. But I've never had problems with Mozilla's speed. If you're comparing it to 4 year old software, I suggest you upgrade and compare apples to apples.
We all agree that piracy isn't a good thing, but I'd like to think the P2P is viable even without copyright infringement.
It's anonymous - by its nature, you don't know who is on the other end. I sure as heck won't be downloading programs from it anytime soon.
It's unreliable - what's on the network can vary from where you are on the net, and can change at any moment.
There's no quality control - there are a lot of files out there with bad names, and a lot of names for some files. It's easy to waste hours downloading a file and find that it's not what it says.
I have the option of going to Project Gutenberg or P2P for Tom Saywer - why should I waste my time trying to fish it out of P2P? I have the option of going to Debian or P2P for Exim - why on Earth would I risk a trojan by pulling it off P2P?
When it comes to signatures, forgery has always been illegal
From wordnet:
forgery n 1: a copy that is presented as the original [syn: imitation, counterfeit]
2: criminal falsification by making or altering an instrument with intent to defraud
Forgery is illegal, but this isn't forgery. There's no fraud; we just want the right to use our hardware as we will.
Cancerous is a somewhat loaded term, but it most certainly is viral.
Why is viral any less loaded than cancerous? The GPL certainly does not behave as a virus, considering it only comes in when it's invited.
Why even bother going to the class if your going to surf and read email in class?
To get the homework and to make sure you know where the class is.
I would distinguish them on the basis that MBCS character representations are not of a fixed size, whereas in any usual representation of the Unicode character set, a character at least occupies a fixed number of bytes.
Any usual representation? Only UTF-32 has fixed width characters; a large set of uncommon UTF-16 characters are four bytes long, and a UTF-8 character can take anywhere from one byte to four.
Unicode is a MBCS, and is entirely suitable for Japanese. You have to set up input and output filters (using iconv or some similar application) for the locale charset, just like any other locale. If you use GTK or Qt or Java, you don't have an option - you can use Unicode without much problem, and can't use other charsets.
If you use GTK, it will automatically flip dialog boxes R-to-L. As for vertical presentation - who's doing vertical presentation? I don't know of anyone who supports vertical presentation on dialog boxes; the Chinese, who traditionally write vertically, are happy with L-to-R in a computer situation, and the Mongolians, the only other people I know of who write vertically, tend to use Cyrillic or at least write traditional Mongolian horizontally in a computer situation. With all due respect to the Mongolians, if they're the only people who may use vertical writing systems in computers, I don't think vertical presentation is the most important thing to worry about.
You don't have to rewrite the world; a lot of this stuff's already been done in the standard toolkits.
Did I say fluent?
So the US has more French speakers then France, because most of us can say facade and valet?
I suppose if we want more translators to help us out, we need a similar tool for po files - any volunteers for hacking up Qt Linguist to support both formats?
It seems wrong to say Qt Linguist versus gettext; how do KBable and GTranslator compare to Qt Linguist?
Computational Linguistics is the BIG growth area, and it seems that Microsoft isn't going to miss the party.
It's been the big growth area for 40 years now; translation is fundamentally equal to the hard AI problem. Getting even moderately decent technical translation is very hard, and doesn't look to be getting easy anytime soon. I'm sure they can produce something better then what we have, but with the amount of work thrown at the problem already, I don't expect miracles.
The UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all use what's often referred to as International English,
By whom? The British? The people I communicate with through Debian, including Romanians, Germans, Chinese and Japanese, seem to use US spellings.
Most people would also be surprised to know that the largest english speaking country is China.
Not in any meaningful sense. Chinese speak Chinese to each other. Even if over 25% of the Chinese population speaks some English, that doesn't mean they speak fluent English, or that they could read or write something of moderate complexity without a dictionary.
America makes up a very small part of the total english speaking world.
Well, America makes up almost 300 million people. Even assuming everyone in the world speaks English, that's still 5%; and while a lot of the world speaks English, a country aren't really part of the "english speaking world" until they primarily speak and write English. So Australia, New Zealand, U.K., Ireland, U.S., Canada, and to some extent India and Africa. Of the solidly English speaking countries, the U.S. is the largest.
What is the usefulness of anonymous communication? I can't see any. Only a way for troublemakers to cause trouble.
I'm quite sure that Hitler or Stalin, or the American British circa the 1770's would have agreed with you; it would be so much easier to crack down on dissidents that way. I guess you'd like to do away with anonymous voting, too; if 'troublemakers' need to have their every word scrutinized, why should their votes escape scrutiny?
So the government would have to pay for it--which means we'd have to pay for it. My taxes would end up paying for a cell deep in the Ozarks that nobody wants or needs or cares about.
Why do you think that nobody needs it? There's people living in up in them there hills. We as a society decided that every American would have water, and electricity and phone service - it probably still wouldn't be feasible to run those to some places. What's the problem with everyone in America being able to communicate from anywhere in America? Just the comfort of knowing you can communicate without worry anywhere is one great advantage.
No longer getting mocked by Finns who can get cell coverage anywhere in Finland is another, of course.
With all due respect, the "engineered by aliens" idea merely re-directs the question of "first cause."
So does your idea of a "mysterious god".
Somehow, I have a feeling William Scarboro would be happier with a $1 donation for the source code to his family than a free giveaway of one of his greatest works.
Is this because you knew him personally, and think that is what he would want? Is his family in poor straits? Or are you second-guessing people who worked with him without having any actual knowledge of the situation?
Defense lawyers generally don't roll over when confronted with things like that. I'd expect that before the trial was over, the jury would hear all about the possible problems.
Well, gee, then we should just let anything in. Not everybody has O.J.'s defense lawyers, and even with the best defense lawyers, an "expert" can be a pretty condemning thing, no matter what a defense lawyer (sleezy scumbag defending murderers) says.
Strafing around corners isn't actually that bad an idea, so you can see if someone is going to run into you.
Yeah, well, one of my friends tried strafing around a corner while running around in the dorm. It turns out you need some dexterity to do that; I understand the high speed impact with the wall was not very comfortable.
You must think that the justice system is full of idiots. I'm sure that this "new" fingerprint is going to hold up against the old fingerprint really well.
Erasing it was the extreme example, but one of the big problems with our justice system is "experts" spewing nonsense and juries buying it. If a fingerprint expert gives us an extremely-blurry before and a clear after, most juries are going to accept the change on his word, unless it's totally wrong. The jury is not likely to be packed with fingerprint experts; they won't know what was significant in the original and what was just noise. Is that swirl part of the original design, or did the object turn while the perp was holding it?