And how would this be terribly helpful? Even if you could trust a company to distribute your money in a way which benefited you rather than themselves, you've still got the same problem you had before only now they can get a great deal of money out of a number of accounts with one stolen card.
The Benefit of this thing is essentially that, lacking your fingerprint(the value of biometrics can be discussed elsewhere), it cannot be used, and zero fraud liability or no, $200 is a lot cheaper than the kind of damage someone can do in less than an hour with your credit cards, especially if you don't notice them missing right away.
The differences between TMI and Chernobyl are essentially those of design and the ways in which they affected the disaster.
Though the containment building was very helpful the design of the reactor was somewhat more important, Soviet and US nuclear plants use a different substance as a moderator(could have the term wrong, been a while, it's the thing which slows the neutrons so the reaction can take place). In the US reactors use deuterium(heavy water) as a moderator, if the reaction gets out of control and the heat reaches a certain point the heavywater is vaporized and the reaction stops, in the USSR however they used graphite for this purpose, which does not evaporate in the same way. Because of this, not only was the reaction not contained as well at Chernobyl, but the reaction continued for a much longer period of time releasing more radiation.
Of course the way things were handled also didn't help Chernobyl much, I've seen the footage of the people they sent in there afterwards, they had nowhere near sufficient protection and I've also seen footage of the gigantic lump of plutonium sitting underneath where the reactor used to be. Not a good place for inadequately protected people.
Personally I find that most oil change places will top off your washer fluid for you if it's low anyway for little or no charge so long as you're getting the oil changed at the same time, and that my oil needs to be changed a lot more often than my washer fluid.
Yes I could change my own oil, even with my somewhat limited knowledge of automobile mechanics I could do that, but my driveway is steep, my garage small, and then even if I trek the car out to somewhere flat and do it there I've still got to dispose of the dirty oil which is a pain.
Well the biggest problem with this idea is that, regardless of whether they could, very few companies would choose to design an rpg, let alone an MMORPG in the style which you suggest. It has been done to an extent(Morrowind is really the only example I can think of off hand), but one of the primary aspects of most rpgs of any sort seems to be the idea that your ability is determined more by your characters skill than by your own(even in morrowind all you can really do is hack and slash, blocking and armor protection are entirely controlled by your skill level).
Another problem is of couse the fact that a large percentage of RPG's take place in at least a pseudo mystical/medieval world(I know there are exceptions), and pretty much without fail every single FPS which has taken on this sort of combat style has been mediocre at best, melee combat does not translate very well to the world of the first person shooter.
In essence the problem is not so much the fact that it couldn't be done(it could, especially if you were willing to place relatively high system requirements on the product and take the financial losses from limiting your audience), but that the demand is not there for this particular genre.
In a somewhat side note, I too am somewhat looking forward to World of Warcraft(though I won't be able to get it until I can find steady employment which isn't all that easy in this world), but more because they have been selling the idea that the game is playable in lower amounts of time. Many games, especialy those where you cannot restrict who you play with, suffer because a casual player simply cannot really survive amongst those who have more time to spend.
You'd think that, but it's tragically not so. You get your product out at the right time, a lot of people will buy it, perhaps they won't be happy with it, but that doesn't terribly much matter since they're still sold.
You bring out the greatest product in the world in a bad time period, say right after christmas rather than before, then your target group has already spent their money and won't really be interested in any sort of mass spending for a while to come, by which point your product will be old and considered(whether it is or not) obsolete so you'll have to at the very least drop the price substantially to sell it.
On a slightly unrelated note, anyone notice this doesn't happen to computer software anymore. I'm not even talking about things like Diablo I which use a game of the year award to hang onto full price for something like 5 years, I'm talking about regular software, the discount stuff from earlier seasons I used to buy and enjoy when I was in high school has seemingly disappeared. Wonder what happened, do old games still sell well at that price?
Not entirely sure what the point will be either. True you can't pretend to be a German citizen at the airport, but the rest of the world doesn't give you a retina to scan against. I don't see the point in this really, I mean they can't really skip searches for people who match the id because they could just as easily be terrorists or whatnot(well not quite as likely, but ya know). It might serve a little more purpose if the EU adopted it since then you couldn't just drive over the border without showing your passport, but still it's not really useful.
They aren't looking much for cheap college grads either, you need experience in addition to being a college grad, as well as the certs(round here at least, though people here are fucking clueless).
Normally I dislike the nontechnical with all the usual ferocity, but given how difficult it is for many people to turn their computers on and off, this is somewhat of a unrealistic expectation, and I'm glad it is or we'd all be more out of work than at present.
This of course doesn't excuse the military who have access to all sorts of things and ought to know better.
Unemployment statistics are trash. They don't include recent college grads or those who have been unemployed for a prolonged period of time because no one bothers to register unless they are eligable for unemployment benefits. After a while people are no longer eligable and so they stop registering as unemployed, the statistics assume they are employed which isn't necessarily the case.
Re:Lets hope that the result is progress
on
Google v. Microsoft
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· Score: 1
Actually that's pretty much exactly why google will be the winner, not necessarily for all time, but for the forseeable future.
Google has already succeeded in the competition which really mattered back when there were lots of search engines. Now people go to google to get information, everyone knows what google is and everyone who has any idea how to search the web uses google, basically because there isn't really any viable alternative. Microsoft has to succeed in altering the minds of people, they have to make joe sixpack think "microsoft" when he wants to search the web when he already thinks "google".
In order for microsoft to succeed they would have to compete against a product which has all of the advantages which they usually rely on(name recognition, ease of use, lack of serious competition). They aren't so good at that as they are against lesser known/used products. Nor is the search engine use market expanding(as was browsers). I agree that MS has very little shot here, MSN isn't that successful a portal or ISP to begin with and they've little chance of competing with something which has almost become a word.
Yep, but wait a couple of years until you graduate, you've got a whole bunch of debt(unless you're lucky), no health insurance cause you're not on your parents policy anymore, and you're trying to find a job with no more government assistance(student jobs don't count as employment as far as unemployment benefits go). That's the boat I'm in, I do very limited time contract work doing the manual labor parts of IT(setting up computers, packing them away, things which can't be done by someone in a room an indeterminate distance away). My degree gives me little or nothing in the way of qualifications and trying to filter through what companies call a job posting(also known as lets list everything and hope we get the things we actually want) isn't exactly fun.
I don't really have a problem with Indians having work, the thing I have a problem with is that I, as someone living in the United states cannot compete with someone from India, it isn't possible, because of the relative cost of living an Indian programmer can be well off on a salary that wouldn't pay my rent. I can't fix that, I can't turn 10 grand into a maintainable lifestyle, they can. There is absolutely nothing I can do about that.
Nor do prices go down substantially when products are shipped overseas, have you seen any sort of dramatic drop in the cost of any sort of software(buisness or otherwise) accompanying this move to outsourcing overseas, or even to the continued use of contractors for jobs here rather than salaried employees with benefits packages. I haven't.
The problem with free trade, at least as it exists now is that it doesn't really help the regular American populace at all, the companies benefit(temporarily) because they can sell products at American prices while paying overseas costs increasing their profits. The overseas employees benefit because for them, the lower costs earn them a good living.
The problem is that the system relies on people being able to pay American scaled prices for the items, as more jobs get shipped overseas this simply won't be possible anymore. We're not talking about people being forced to work for less, we're talking about people being out of work all together. Even if prices did drop people who are out of work all together or working for close to minimum wage don't really care, even a 50% reduction if cost wouldn't make up for an 80% reduction in income.
The general problem is that even the smartest children aren't necessarily above average in all necessary ways(sometimes exactly the opposite) you may be able to do calculus at age 6 but that doesn't make you ready for high school or college, there is more to each of these experiences than education.
As for doing things at the speed of the smartest kid in the class, I was pretty close to that, and I know that while I wasn't challenged much, many of my classmates were, even at the level we were going at(I was admitedly in advanced courses), if they'd been going at a rate sufficient to challenge me, most of them just have given up and there would have been no point.
what good will it actually do anyone. Knowing someone is lying(unless you can ask them a question with only one answer and even then not necessarily(you could ask a SO if he/she is cheating on you and they could be doing something which they don't consider cheating but you do or vice versa)) doesn't really do you any good. When we go to a car dealership or listen to a politicion we already assume they're lying most of the time, it doesn't actually tell you what the truth actually is.
Perhaps if these things became sufficiently popular, people would be forced not to lie anymore, but lying is part of what keeps our society together.
Never could quite understand that one myself. When the item in question be it earring, necklace, etc can be produced using glass of the appropriate color rather than the gemstone and be indistinguishable to the naked eye then you're wasting money on it.
Personally I'd rather spend the money on something which would benefit myself and my SC in a more useful way such as even taking a nice vacation, but that's just me.
I'm not going to claim that ADD is or is not a disease, I have very little experience with it, that's not to say I don't have a bit of trouble paying attention, as do most people in our generation, but that it never really caused me any serious problems.
What I will say is that the idea that the teacher should keep up with you is somewhat ludicrous, especially in these days of over filled classrooms and underpaid teachers. No school can teach everyone individually at their speed of learning it isn't possible.
As for skipping grades, it's just generally a bad idea beyond very limited levels. That's not to say there shouldn't be some form of independent study or the like for people who are beyond the grade they are in, but there's more to advancing a grade than what you know, it's also about what you're emotionally and physically ready for.
There are changes which happen in your brain over the course of your development which allow you to think in different ways, there is a process of emotional maturation which allows you to deal with the world. I can still remember a news story about some kid who graduated from college at age 10, he wanted to be a game show host, his mind was way out in front of everything else and he wasn't really ready for life.
School(especially in the years between about 4th grade and your second year of high school) can seem like it's just a big waste of time and they're just essentially babysitting you. To an extent this is true, but this is primarily because 99.999999% of the time, the kids aren't ready for the real world. Hell most adults aren't really ready for the real world.
This is really about the only real option, I kicked it for a while(not too long admitedly, but it is doable) a couple of times, haven't had the motivation to do so again.
It's terribly unpleasant, but giving it up is pretty much the only way to do it, it's usually too much of a habit to cut down gradually as you would with cigarettes or some such, once you've had one you easily go back for another(same as you would if you tried to cut back on cigarettes without aid).
I found the pain and duration of the headaches is relative to how addicted you are, at the point you're currently at(the level I'm back to now) it'll probably be a good week before you start to feel significantly better about it.
It may of course not really be worthwhile for you to actually do this. Personally the way I figure it is that, as far as things to be addicted to caffeine is relatively harmless(good oral hygeine and a reasonable amount of excercise will overcome most of the problems associated with the sugar and most likely at this point caffeine no longer really has any major effect on you unless you don't consume it). It doesn't bother other people the way smoking does or impair your ability to function the way alcohol does so unless you have a real reason for giving it up(which will help you in the process) dont' really bother.
However if you really need to kick it, cold turkey is about the only way which will work, and it will be terribly unpleasant for a while after which point you just have to have the will power to stay away from it.
Well the body can produce things which bond to specific viruses those things are called anti-bodies and are relatively effective for most diseases spread by viruses(excluding those which kill too fast or attack the immune system(HIV)) but you're probably right it wouldn't be all that effective and there are probably better ways to do it.
The thing I would be interested to see is a cancer treatment based on this idea. Not to actually cure cancer since I don't think that's possible with this method but to pick up the cancerous cells in the bloodstream and prevent them from spreading cancer to other parts of the body. A lot of times it's when the cancers have metastecized(no idea of spelling) to other parts of the body that you get the real problems. Not to mention it might reduce the chances of cancer recurring.
Just as a point, I never expected it to get modded up, I just wanted the parent modded up so people could see something like it. You may note that I even turned off my karma bonus so I wasn't whoring.
Ok, firstly I've done some development and some administration work so I know a bit about all of this from both sides.
1) The list of so called administrators here is ridiculous, you can't include network/system administrators in with package vendors(what ever the hell they're supposed to be) or blame the whole thing on J2EE because it has architecture problems, that's not admins fault. As a side note, forcing developers to do things they don't want to(document code, plan before they start etc) is a necessary evil since most coders including myself don't want to do these things.
2) The idea of developers doing their own administration is to be honest laughable, if this guy thinks that administration slows down development imagine what it would be like if the people who were supposed to be coding were doing it, even if it didn't take all their time they'd be focusing the results on their needs not on the needs of the secretary next door.
3)As for getting root permission on anything or being able to install your own software. Being able to code does not make you qualified to run a system even an internal test system(assuming you want it connected to the internet). Even on a windows box giving root access to anyone(even developers) can be a serious nightmare. In my experience fixing the computers of people who know something(ie developers) is much worse than doing it for people who don't since other than the usual crap they don't futz with their pc's much. Supporting a machine with random software and random configuration is hard enough when it isn't mission critical, ask tech support.
4)As for Roaming profiles, the reason people set them up is because that way, when you hose your machine(which 90% of people will do either because of ignorance or bad luck) they can just roll you out a new one without having to recover the data from your old one.
That said any system administrator who tells you "it's only two weeks worth of work" under any circumstance beside an act of god(there is no reason you shouldn't be able to get your data back but you can't) should be canned and even under the act of god circumstances they should be apologetic.
Don't know much about Bigpond as a company(moved from Aussie well before anyone had ADSL or cable or even 14.4 modems), but if they go down I doubt it will be because of this. It's probably too strict and they will probably end up changing it, but spam is out of control and something has to be done to stop it.
Everyone here is usually all in favor of any sort unimplementable scheme to prevent spam and this one(with a bit of tweaking) might not be a bad idea. Admitedly some legitimate customers will be inconvenienced and might, here's a schocker, have to change the way they send e-mails, but if it works to solve the problem it might not be such a bad thing for that to have to happen. I've said it before and I'll say it again, you can either have a totally anonymous free internet where everyone including those you don't like(spammers, virus writers, hackers, etc) can do exactly what they like or you can give up that anonymity and a degree of freedom(as is already the case) and do something about those people. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
This may be both off topic, posted by an anonymous coward, and insanely long, but it should be modded up just so that the general slashdot population isn't denied the pleasure of witnessing the worlds most anal retentive pedant in action.
I've seen grammar nazis before but this is the most incredible thing I've personally ever witnessed.
The Benefit of this thing is essentially that, lacking your fingerprint(the value of biometrics can be discussed elsewhere), it cannot be used, and zero fraud liability or no, $200 is a lot cheaper than the kind of damage someone can do in less than an hour with your credit cards, especially if you don't notice them missing right away.
Though the containment building was very helpful the design of the reactor was somewhat more important, Soviet and US nuclear plants use a different substance as a moderator(could have the term wrong, been a while, it's the thing which slows the neutrons so the reaction can take place). In the US reactors use deuterium(heavy water) as a moderator, if the reaction gets out of control and the heat reaches a certain point the heavywater is vaporized and the reaction stops, in the USSR however they used graphite for this purpose, which does not evaporate in the same way. Because of this, not only was the reaction not contained as well at Chernobyl, but the reaction continued for a much longer period of time releasing more radiation.
Of course the way things were handled also didn't help Chernobyl much, I've seen the footage of the people they sent in there afterwards, they had nowhere near sufficient protection and I've also seen footage of the gigantic lump of plutonium sitting underneath where the reactor used to be. Not a good place for inadequately protected people.
Yes I could change my own oil, even with my somewhat limited knowledge of automobile mechanics I could do that, but my driveway is steep, my garage small, and then even if I trek the car out to somewhere flat and do it there I've still got to dispose of the dirty oil which is a pain.
Another problem is of couse the fact that a large percentage of RPG's take place in at least a pseudo mystical/medieval world(I know there are exceptions), and pretty much without fail every single FPS which has taken on this sort of combat style has been mediocre at best, melee combat does not translate very well to the world of the first person shooter.
In essence the problem is not so much the fact that it couldn't be done(it could, especially if you were willing to place relatively high system requirements on the product and take the financial losses from limiting your audience), but that the demand is not there for this particular genre.
In a somewhat side note, I too am somewhat looking forward to World of Warcraft(though I won't be able to get it until I can find steady employment which isn't all that easy in this world), but more because they have been selling the idea that the game is playable in lower amounts of time. Many games, especialy those where you cannot restrict who you play with, suffer because a casual player simply cannot really survive amongst those who have more time to spend.
You bring out the greatest product in the world in a bad time period, say right after christmas rather than before, then your target group has already spent their money and won't really be interested in any sort of mass spending for a while to come, by which point your product will be old and considered(whether it is or not) obsolete so you'll have to at the very least drop the price substantially to sell it.
On a slightly unrelated note, anyone notice this doesn't happen to computer software anymore. I'm not even talking about things like Diablo I which use a game of the year award to hang onto full price for something like 5 years, I'm talking about regular software, the discount stuff from earlier seasons I used to buy and enjoy when I was in high school has seemingly disappeared. Wonder what happened, do old games still sell well at that price?
Not entirely sure what the point will be either. True you can't pretend to be a German citizen at the airport, but the rest of the world doesn't give you a retina to scan against. I don't see the point in this really, I mean they can't really skip searches for people who match the id because they could just as easily be terrorists or whatnot(well not quite as likely, but ya know). It might serve a little more purpose if the EU adopted it since then you couldn't just drive over the border without showing your passport, but still it's not really useful.
They aren't looking much for cheap college grads either, you need experience in addition to being a college grad, as well as the certs(round here at least, though people here are fucking clueless).
As a side not 60 fps is not a decent frame rate, though it's far more tolerable on an lcd than on a crt.
This of course doesn't excuse the military who have access to all sorts of things and ought to know better.
Unemployment statistics are trash. They don't include recent college grads or those who have been unemployed for a prolonged period of time because no one bothers to register unless they are eligable for unemployment benefits. After a while people are no longer eligable and so they stop registering as unemployed, the statistics assume they are employed which isn't necessarily the case.
Google has already succeeded in the competition which really mattered back when there were lots of search engines. Now people go to google to get information, everyone knows what google is and everyone who has any idea how to search the web uses google, basically because there isn't really any viable alternative. Microsoft has to succeed in altering the minds of people, they have to make joe sixpack think "microsoft" when he wants to search the web when he already thinks "google".
In order for microsoft to succeed they would have to compete against a product which has all of the advantages which they usually rely on(name recognition, ease of use, lack of serious competition). They aren't so good at that as they are against lesser known/used products. Nor is the search engine use market expanding(as was browsers). I agree that MS has very little shot here, MSN isn't that successful a portal or ISP to begin with and they've little chance of competing with something which has almost become a word.
So true, but they don't cost benefits which makes companies think they cost less than regular people.
Yep, but wait a couple of years until you graduate, you've got a whole bunch of debt(unless you're lucky), no health insurance cause you're not on your parents policy anymore, and you're trying to find a job with no more government assistance(student jobs don't count as employment as far as unemployment benefits go). That's the boat I'm in, I do very limited time contract work doing the manual labor parts of IT(setting up computers, packing them away, things which can't be done by someone in a room an indeterminate distance away). My degree gives me little or nothing in the way of qualifications and trying to filter through what companies call a job posting(also known as lets list everything and hope we get the things we actually want) isn't exactly fun.
Nor do prices go down substantially when products are shipped overseas, have you seen any sort of dramatic drop in the cost of any sort of software(buisness or otherwise) accompanying this move to outsourcing overseas, or even to the continued use of contractors for jobs here rather than salaried employees with benefits packages. I haven't.
The problem with free trade, at least as it exists now is that it doesn't really help the regular American populace at all, the companies benefit(temporarily) because they can sell products at American prices while paying overseas costs increasing their profits. The overseas employees benefit because for them, the lower costs earn them a good living.
The problem is that the system relies on people being able to pay American scaled prices for the items, as more jobs get shipped overseas this simply won't be possible anymore. We're not talking about people being forced to work for less, we're talking about people being out of work all together. Even if prices did drop people who are out of work all together or working for close to minimum wage don't really care, even a 50% reduction if cost wouldn't make up for an 80% reduction in income.
As for doing things at the speed of the smartest kid in the class, I was pretty close to that, and I know that while I wasn't challenged much, many of my classmates were, even at the level we were going at(I was admitedly in advanced courses), if they'd been going at a rate sufficient to challenge me, most of them just have given up and there would have been no point.
Perhaps if these things became sufficiently popular, people would be forced not to lie anymore, but lying is part of what keeps our society together.
Personally I'd rather spend the money on something which would benefit myself and my SC in a more useful way such as even taking a nice vacation, but that's just me.
What I will say is that the idea that the teacher should keep up with you is somewhat ludicrous, especially in these days of over filled classrooms and underpaid teachers. No school can teach everyone individually at their speed of learning it isn't possible.
As for skipping grades, it's just generally a bad idea beyond very limited levels. That's not to say there shouldn't be some form of independent study or the like for people who are beyond the grade they are in, but there's more to advancing a grade than what you know, it's also about what you're emotionally and physically ready for.
There are changes which happen in your brain over the course of your development which allow you to think in different ways, there is a process of emotional maturation which allows you to deal with the world. I can still remember a news story about some kid who graduated from college at age 10, he wanted to be a game show host, his mind was way out in front of everything else and he wasn't really ready for life.
School(especially in the years between about 4th grade and your second year of high school) can seem like it's just a big waste of time and they're just essentially babysitting you. To an extent this is true, but this is primarily because 99.999999% of the time, the kids aren't ready for the real world. Hell most adults aren't really ready for the real world.
It's terribly unpleasant, but giving it up is pretty much the only way to do it, it's usually too much of a habit to cut down gradually as you would with cigarettes or some such, once you've had one you easily go back for another(same as you would if you tried to cut back on cigarettes without aid).
I found the pain and duration of the headaches is relative to how addicted you are, at the point you're currently at(the level I'm back to now) it'll probably be a good week before you start to feel significantly better about it.
It may of course not really be worthwhile for you to actually do this. Personally the way I figure it is that, as far as things to be addicted to caffeine is relatively harmless(good oral hygeine and a reasonable amount of excercise will overcome most of the problems associated with the sugar and most likely at this point caffeine no longer really has any major effect on you unless you don't consume it). It doesn't bother other people the way smoking does or impair your ability to function the way alcohol does so unless you have a real reason for giving it up(which will help you in the process) dont' really bother.
However if you really need to kick it, cold turkey is about the only way which will work, and it will be terribly unpleasant for a while after which point you just have to have the will power to stay away from it.
The thing I would be interested to see is a cancer treatment based on this idea. Not to actually cure cancer since I don't think that's possible with this method but to pick up the cancerous cells in the bloodstream and prevent them from spreading cancer to other parts of the body. A lot of times it's when the cancers have metastecized(no idea of spelling) to other parts of the body that you get the real problems. Not to mention it might reduce the chances of cancer recurring.
Never posted as AC in my life, I honestly didn't expect karma from this. I actually expected to modded down.
Just as a point, I never expected it to get modded up, I just wanted the parent modded up so people could see something like it. You may note that I even turned off my karma bonus so I wasn't whoring.
1) The list of so called administrators here is ridiculous, you can't include network/system administrators in with package vendors(what ever the hell they're supposed to be) or blame the whole thing on J2EE because it has architecture problems, that's not admins fault. As a side note, forcing developers to do things they don't want to(document code, plan before they start etc) is a necessary evil since most coders including myself don't want to do these things.
2) The idea of developers doing their own administration is to be honest laughable, if this guy thinks that administration slows down development imagine what it would be like if the people who were supposed to be coding were doing it, even if it didn't take all their time they'd be focusing the results on their needs not on the needs of the secretary next door.
3)As for getting root permission on anything or being able to install your own software. Being able to code does not make you qualified to run a system even an internal test system(assuming you want it connected to the internet). Even on a windows box giving root access to anyone(even developers) can be a serious nightmare. In my experience fixing the computers of people who know something(ie developers) is much worse than doing it for people who don't since other than the usual crap they don't futz with their pc's much. Supporting a machine with random software and random configuration is hard enough when it isn't mission critical, ask tech support.
4)As for Roaming profiles, the reason people set them up is because that way, when you hose your machine(which 90% of people will do either because of ignorance or bad luck) they can just roll you out a new one without having to recover the data from your old one.
That said any system administrator who tells you "it's only two weeks worth of work" under any circumstance beside an act of god(there is no reason you shouldn't be able to get your data back but you can't) should be canned and even under the act of god circumstances they should be apologetic.
Everyone here is usually all in favor of any sort unimplementable scheme to prevent spam and this one(with a bit of tweaking) might not be a bad idea. Admitedly some legitimate customers will be inconvenienced and might, here's a schocker, have to change the way they send e-mails, but if it works to solve the problem it might not be such a bad thing for that to have to happen. I've said it before and I'll say it again, you can either have a totally anonymous free internet where everyone including those you don't like(spammers, virus writers, hackers, etc) can do exactly what they like or you can give up that anonymity and a degree of freedom(as is already the case) and do something about those people. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I've seen grammar nazis before but this is the most incredible thing I've personally ever witnessed.