> Doesn't Firefox warn you if a key for a certain > domain suddenly changes to something different?
No, it doesn't. To my knowledge, no browser does.
It's like I've been saying for at least a couple of years: SSL can in theory provide meaningful data security, but HTTPS uses it incorrectly (in several ways; failure to complain when a cert changes is only one of several problems) and therefore does *not* provide meaningful security.
If you want to transfer some data *securely*, you should not use https. There are much better options, e.g., scp.
To be absolutely fully blunt, HTTPS is not significantly more secure than plain old HTTP.
Note that this doesn't stop me from placing orders online. I just send a check -- which is what I would do anyway, because even if the information *transfer* were completely secure I still wouldn't trust somebody else's servers with information that would allow anyone who breaks in to take arbitrary amounts of money from me. (Amazon recently lost my business, because they will no longer let you just send a check for one purchase. They now want to store your checking account numbers. That's just as risky to me as giving them credit card numbers to store. No thanks. I'll find someone else to buy from.)
The insecurity of https does stop me from doing online banking, but I wouldn't be doing that anyway, because my bank is too small to set up their own online banking and chose to outsource it to some outfit operating out of an obscure archipelago in the Indian Ocean. I'm sure the outfit is legit and above-board or my bank wouldn't be using them, but I'm still not comfortable trusting my money to an outfit operating in a jurisdiction where I would have no real recourse if they ever caused me problems. So I don't do online banking. Small loss: my finances aren't that complicated, and the bank is a grand total of five blocks from my house.
When the reporter asks about the strip's legacy, Waterson talks about how fans remember the strip. I think that misses the point.
If I were asked about the legacy of Calvin and Hobbes, I would talk about some of the ways the better comic strips now are different from any of the comic strips in the eighties. I think Calvin and Hobbes has had a more substantial influence on other cartoonists and their work than probably any other single strip in the history of the funny papers.
> This "The pills must be working" strip has got to be phony
Yes, it's a fake. I have just about every C&H book including TCC&H, and I've never seen that strip before.
But it's just as funny and interesting and pointed as what you normally would expect from a C&H, and I think it fits the spirit of the strip nicely. The visual variation between the panels is very much not up to the typical C&H standard (in more ways than just the one you point out), but I think that fits well with what this particular strip is saying.
However, I'd like to see the author (actually, either the author of this strip, or Waterson, either way) write the rest of the storyline. Obviously, it has to end with Calvin not taking the pills any more. I'd like to see how it gets there. That could be quite interesting. Actually, I think that has the potential to be one of the better C&H storylines ever (which is going some), if it were well done.
BTW, Waterson did do some strips with no word bubbles, although they're not very common (excepting ones with no dialog at all, but that's different).
My numbers look different. I'm seeing IE6, IE7, Firefox, IE8, Chrome, and Safari in that order. All the other browsers (e.g., Opera, Konqueror) come in with lower numbers than Googlebot.
IE8 market share *is* increasing, and IE6 decreasing, but I haven't seen them switch places yet.
Though, it wouldn't surprise me very much if my users were behind the times. I also haven't yet seen the numbers for Vista and Seven (even if combined) rise above the level of Mac OS X, somewhere in the sub-1% range. I'm seeing 85% Windows XP, and most of the rest is Windows 98, and most of the rest after that is search indexers.
I think I have *one* regular user with an iPhone, a couple of Nokia phone users (exactly two different models), a small handful of Mac users, and a couple of Linux users. There's also at least one user with Windows Me, one with FreeBSD, and at least one Blackberry. (I happen to know who the Blackberry user is. Used to be a coworker.)
And no, I can't be absolutely certain of my user counts. But between the number of hits and some other stats that we keep, it's pretty obvious that most of the ones I've guessed at "one user" probably really are just one user. And it's entirely possible that one person is responsible for more than one of these categories (e.g., maybe the FreeBSD guy as a Nokia phone, who knows).
> What's with the "uselessly slow" commentary. The guy did > it just to prove it could be done, which is pretty cool
You must be new here.
It was necessary to point out the slowness in order to forestall a whole lot of drooling, glossy-eyed posts about how obviously because of this OS X is going to completely take over the cellphone market; no, it isn't, Linux rules; yes, it is, Linux is a niche product; OS X will take over the Windows segment; no, Linux will take over that; et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad bedlam.
Pointing out that it's too slow to be practical does not imply that it isn't an interesting achievement from a technical standpoint. It just stops people from going over the top with enthusiastic excitement over the potential of this new technology to revolutionize the world.
> when's the last time you can remember someone [in a movie] using a mouse?
ISTR Montgomery Scott tries to use a mouse in STIV:TSFS. But he doesn't know how (too used to LCARS, apparently, and tries to use it like a microphone), so they tell him to just use the keyboard, which he thinks is "quaint". He then proceeds to already know all the keyboard shortcuts for and be an instant whiz at using some ancient proprietary chem-modeling software that practically nobody had heard of even when it was current.
Which, in terms of realism in movies, is pretty much par for the course.
But you know what Hollywood botches even worse than computers? History. And math. And science. And every other subject they touch. Don't even get me started on Hollywood theology.
I think all of the most *realistic* movies I've ever seen were actually *about* film-making. It appears to be the only thing anyone in Hollywood knows anything about.
> It requires some sort of introduction, at > least a transliteration of the characters > from the Greek to Latin alphabet.
For language learning, transliteration is usually a bad idea.
You may think, "I need this crutch", but what you actually need is to learn the native writing system of the language, and transliteration is a way of putting that off, which actually costs you time and effort. Transliteration almost invariably distorts the language in ways that make it harder to learn.
There are exceptions, but they mostly revolve around languages that have a shared heritage and are so phonetically similar that the fact that they have different writing systems in the first place is the result of some historical external, non-linguistic force (typically, politics). For example, transliterating Urdu into the Devanagari script doesn't distort the language very much. But this is the exception rather than the rule.
For instance, transliterating Greek into the Latin alphabet obscures the distinction between short and long vowels (particularly epsilon versus eta and omicron versus omega), which would make Greek morphology *really* confusing. Transliterating between writing systems that differ to a greater extent (such as attempting to represent freeform-syllable stress-timed English in one-consonant-per-syllable katakana) is worse.
Or did you mean, an explanation of what the different characters mean? That *is* quite helpful, perhaps essential. Definitely essential if you don't have direct access to native speakers.
> (I'll overlook the emoticon, since this isn't a formal > paper, so I would argue it's less inappropriate here.)
Heck, a linguistically enlightened modern forward-thinking professor might even be willing to overlook an *occasional* emoticon in an otherwise literate academic paper, provided the emoticon is tastefully used and does not completely destroy the overall tone of the text.
But yeah, if your "academic paper" reads like something off of/b/, you deserve to flunk out. If you aren't willing to learn to communicate in a professional tone, you can just go get a job stocking shelves or installing plumbing. The white-collar world doesn't have a place for you.
And no, I don't buy that jazz about being raised in a bad environment and how it's all not your fault. You still have to decide whether to study hard or slack off, and that makes all the difference. I went to college with a guy who was raised in Detroit and was the first member of his family to attend school beyond twelfth grade. He had a little catching up to do at first, but he worked a little harder than average for a few months, and by the end of the first year he was doing just fine, getting roughly the same kinds of grades as the kids who'd gone to private high schools.
Is it a little easier sometimes if you're raised in an educated environment? Sure. But either way you have to be willing to learn, and to work at it a little, or you're sunk (unless you're some kind of super-genius with a photographic memory, but that's exceedingly rare).
Attitude is the real key. It's a personal choice you make. Either you decide "I'm willing to put in the effort to discipline myself and make my studies a priority so I can do as well as possible", or else you say "Bah, studying is for nerds. I'm going to play cards all night and then waltz into class five minutes late tomorrow morning without reviewing the chapter."
(Okay, sure, there's a middle ground where you manage to put in just enough effort to graduate, not quite "cum laude", more like "o laude", but you do graduate. Yeah, you could probably strike that balance. Do you really want to be mediocre and barely adequate? Is that really your goal in life? Emo?)
Yes, formal academic writing is different from casual speech. It has been that way for centuries. It's just something you have to learn if you want to do well in school. It won't be the only thing either. Get cracking.
For what it's worth, I'm not a big fan of most American comedy either.
The difference between British comedy and American comedy is, British comedy isn't funny because nobody understands it; whereas, American comedy isn't funny even though you can understand it just fine, even if you have roughly the same intelligence quotient as a jar of mayonnaise.
> Although I basically agree with this sentiment, one > thing that should be considered is what someone does > when the fail to get a license.
Well, when you put it that way...
What on earth do you think people did sixty years ago, when the average household had only one car instead of three or four? They didn't give up and die of starvation because "the food is too far away to walk", I can tell you that for free.
Use your imagination a little. There are some options.
I suspect the most popular choice, these days, would be to take some additional training and try again. (And if you can't see how additional driver's training would be beneficial for a lot of American drivers, you may not be paying close attention to how a lot of people drive.)
But there are other ways to go too. You can catch rides with other people and chip in for gas. Or you could walk; it's actually possible to walk *MUCH* farther than most Americans realize. (Although in small midwestern towns it can be pretty hard to walk more than two blocks without turning down free rides from passing motorists who recognize you, and turning down rides can offend people, so watch out for that.) You can get a bicycle for the summer time and a snowmobile for the winter time. You could get a horse and let your friends call you a redneck. (What do they know, anyway?) Build a scooter out of Lego. You might even make the slashdot front page as an added bonus. In a pinch, you could even (gasp, shock, horror) relocate to a residence more proximate to the places you need to go on a regular basis.
I shouldn't need to tell you how to get where you need to go. That's your business. Figure something out. Be resourceful. Use your head for something besides holding down your neck.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that very few people should have a driver's license. I'm only saying they should have to meet more stringent requirements in order to get and keep the license. Whether they want to bother to meet those requirements is up to them. The requirements should be serious enough to keep folks from taking the license (and the responsibility that it represents) so much for granted that they constantly do incredibly foolish and dangerous things while driving.
And the requirements should also be designed to ensure that the people who pass are, in general, actually capable of driving more or less safely. (Driving motor vehicles on the open road will never be *entirely* safe, granted. But I'm talking about a reasonable level of safe-driving capability.)
And if someone *does* still take the matter lightly and do something incredibly dangerous (such as preparing sashimi in the passenger seat while texting and reading a novel and, incidentally, driving down the freeway) then yeah, we should take their license away. The rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- in that order. You do not have the inalienable right to put other people's lives at risk just because you think multitasking makes you happier. Either pull off the road, or pay attention to your driving.
> I'm math-challenged, and find the > spreadsheet easier to use, too.
I majored in math, and I find the spreadsheet easier to use for a lot of things too. Although, the calculator app opens faster, so I tend to use that when I just want to do a simple addition or such like. But for anything complicated, yeah, I'm generally going to go with the spreadsheet.
I think it mostly has to do with whether you already know (the basics of) how to use spreadsheets or not. If you don't happen to already know how to use spreadsheets, a calculator program is going to be easier to learn, because everyone under the age of fifty has used one of the physical real-world devices on which it's modeled.
Since the Japanese will be producing the 3D programming, we'll get to watch 3D segments of celebrities watching and reacting to 3D segments of celebrities eating and reacting to mundane foods. Have I got that about right?
Could be worse, I suppose. Could be British comedy.
> Can you imagine the howl from GM if anybody managed > to seriously propose that GM be liable for car > accidents involving their vehicle?
What makes you think GM's going to still be around in 2025?
But yeah, robocars are legally impractical, because if even one robocar ever causes an accident (nevermind how many accidents they've prevented), the public outcry would be... significant.
My proposal is that we ramp up the requirements to obtain and hold a driver's license. Driver's licenses are dangerous in the wrong hands. Stop handing them out like candy. Make prospective drivers show that they can actually handle taking responsibility for the lives of everyone else on the road. It'll never be perfect, but we should be doing a lot better than we are doing currently.
> I also have this special amulet that keeps tigers from eating > me. I've had it all my life and I've never been eaten by a tiger...
Heh. My dad gave my sister one of those when she was about five years old, only hers protected her from tigers *and* tornadoes. (She was afraid of tornadoes at the time, which is the main reason he gave it to her.) Any time she wasn't entirely sure it was working (say, when the weather got dark), he'd ask, "You haven't seen any tigers around, have you?" Nope? Must be working, then.
> Actually, you only need a license to drive on public roads.
Granted.
The other poster meant to imply the "on public roads" part when he said driving is a privilege rather than a right. So, sure, if you want to put in a driving track in your back yard and drive around and around on it (for recreational purposes, presumably), you don't need a license for that.
But a driver's license -- the "right" to drive on the public roads -- is a privilege that is granted only to people who pass the driving test, which theoretically is supposed to require them to demonstrate that they can drive safely.
The problem is, the requirements to obtain and hold a driver's license are far too lax, and so we license a lot of people for driving that we shouldn't, because they're not safe drivers at all. Among other things...
* The vision test is WAY too lax. They only ever ask you to read the second line up, but frankly even the bottom line is enormous boldface type. If your vision is even halfway good enough for driving, you should be able to read a line half the point size of the bottom one. Furthermore, the text is stationary, and you can stare at it for several seconds before answering, which is definitely not going to be possible on the road. The text should appear briefly and be moving the whole time.
* The driving test does not require you to demonstrate the ability to deal with adverse weather conditions, but the license allows you to drive under adverse weather conditions. IMO, if you want to be licensed to drive in non-ideal weather conditions, you should have to pass tests in the rain, in fog, and on slush.
* The driving test does not require you to demonstrate the ability to handle night-time visibility, but the license allows you to operate a vehicle on the public roads at night. IMO, you should have to pass a night-driving test, as well as a day-driving test, before receiving any kind of driver's license.
* The maneuverability test, although it is good as far as it goes, really only measures your ability to maneuver the vehicle at parking-lot speeds. There should be additional tests measuring your ability to maneuver the vehicle at faster speeds. (Obviously, the ones for different speeds would be different. You can't turn on a twelve-foot radius while backing up at highway speeds, nor should you try to.)
* Currently, you don't have to keep your record accident-free in order to continue to hold the license. This SHOULD be a requirement.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Basically, the requirements for holding a driver's license should be ratcheted up about three orders of magnitude. Unsafe drivers are the number one danger to Americans. Driving accidents kill more people in this country than cancer and terrorism combined. Driving on the public roads puts lives at risk. Prospective drivers should have to show that they can handle the responsibility.
> Different people can handle different levels of distraction. > So, there should be tests. Depending on your score, you > get to have (or not have) certain things in your vehicle, > like radios, heaters, people, pets, phones, etc.
Too complicated.
I've got a simpler rule that would actually work: If you are involved in an accident, we take away your driving privileges. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, you do not drive any more, full stop.
You can then walk for the rest of your life, or take public transportation (if it's available in your area), or if you can afford it you can hire a full-time trained professional driver who will keep his attention on the driving.
It would have to actually be enforced, or people wouldn't take it seriously. But once about 5% of the population loses their driving privileges for life, people would start to realize that maybe they should pay attention to driving when they're driving.
And no, we can't give second chances, in general, because if we gave second chances, the people who hadn't had their first accident yet would think they didn't need to be careful. I suppose we could give second chances to people whose first accident was before they were eighteen, provided we make them wait until they're 25 or so to drive again. To a seventeen-year-old, "until I'm 25" seems virtually the same as "forever", so that would probably not hurt the motivational value very much.
And I suppose we could maybe give second chances, after 5 years or so, to people who are determined not to have been at-fault in the accident (e.g., Bob was sitting at a red light and was rear-ended). This somewhat weakens the motivation to pay attention, though. We don't really want people to think, "I just have to pay enough attention to avoid *causing* an accident." We want them to think, "I have to pay enough attention to *avoid* an accident." So my vote would be that everyone involved in the accident should never drive again. Heck, passengers too. Their lives are at risk already, why not put their driving privileges at risk too? Maybe then they'd stop distracting the driver. The roads are dangerous. You gotta pay attention.
> I've never seen any evidence, either in my testing or > online, that Vista ran programs any slower than XP.
My limited experience with Vista suggests that it *starts up* slower than XP when you first turn it on.
Like XP, Vista goes ahead and displays a picture of your desktop several minutes before it's done doing all of its startup chores, so users who have just turned on the computer are tempted to believe that it's up and running and ready to use... but it's not. I'm pretty sure Microsoft added this "optimization" as an answer to complaints that earlier versions of Windows took too long to start up, but it's the opposite of progress. Windows now takes even longer to start up, but it shows you a non-interactive picture of the desktop while you wait just to tease you.
The only way to tell when it's really ready to use is either to keep clicking on things (which makes it take even longer and eventually lands you a whole bunch of unnecessary open windows) or to hover over certain parts of the would-be UI and watch the mouse pointer to see when it quits showing the hourglass/spinner/whatever wait pointer.
If someone doesn't understand this (and I can tell you for free that most end users don't get it), they could easily draw the conclusion that Vista is slower overall, because it makes them wait longer. Of course, that's not really program startup time they're waiting on; it's OS startup time. But many users don't understand the distinction.
These same users also often leave the load-at-system-start widgets turned on for a bunch of programs that no way ever should be loading at system start, so that exacerbates the problem even further for them. They're not just waiting for Windows; they're also waiting for Adobe Reader and Java and a bunch of other stuff that they don't use at all nine days out of ten, but it's starting up time they turn the computer on anyway.
Other systems (Debian, for instance) also take longer to start up than XP, but once you see the desktop, it doesn't take very long after that to become fully interactive. So it's easier to see the distinction between OS-startup time and UI responsiveness once the system is fully started.
If you turn a Windows computer on and go do something else for fifteen minutes and come back, it'll feel more responsive. That's true for XP as well as Vista.
Well, it wouldn't work exactly the way you say, because the client PCs don't ask the router stuff like "give me the web page for http://www.slashdot.org/". It's more like "send this UDP packet to [IPv4 address of DNS server]" and then after a bit "send this TCP traffic to [IPv4 address of slashdot]".
So what the router would actually have to do is proxy everything, including DNS lookups. And when the client software tries to use a protocol that's newer than the router firmware, it'll fail, especially if the target system doesn't have an IPv4 address.
But the client systems aren't what's holding up IPv6 deployment at this point.
What's holding it up is, there are exactly zero services available via IPv6 that aren't also available via IPv4; whereas, there are *lots* of IPv4-only services available. So the demand for IPv4 is overwhelmingly larger than the demand for IPv6. So when an ISP runs the pros and cons for the question, "should we move our customers over to IPv6", the answer always comes back "Of course not, are you insane?"
The transition, when it does finally happen, will be most painful for people who for one reason or another can't be on both internets. As best I can figure, you'll have on one side people who can't get an IPv4 address because they're all given out already, and on the other side people whose ISP doesn't provide IPv6 support yet, or who are using old legacy software that doesn't support it. It probably won't be too bad at first, because most of the people who won't be able to get global IPv4 addresses will be just client systems, and they should at least be able get access to the IPv4 network via NAT. As long as *servers* can all get IPv4 addresses, we should be mostly okay for a while.
Not that there won't be problems, but it's not like the world's going to split in half with the IPv4 people and the IPv6 people totally unable to communicate with one another at all. Once there's a reason to do so, most people with IPv4 access will be able to get IPv6 as well, and like I said the IPv6 people will generally be able to access most IPv4 services via NAT.
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> Doesn't Firefox warn you if a key for a certain
> domain suddenly changes to something different?
No, it doesn't. To my knowledge, no browser does.
It's like I've been saying for at least a couple of years: SSL can in theory provide meaningful data security, but HTTPS uses it incorrectly (in several ways; failure to complain when a cert changes is only one of several problems) and therefore does *not* provide meaningful security.
If you want to transfer some data *securely*, you should not use https. There are much better options, e.g., scp.
To be absolutely fully blunt, HTTPS is not significantly more secure than plain old HTTP.
Note that this doesn't stop me from placing orders online. I just send a check -- which is what I would do anyway, because even if the information *transfer* were completely secure I still wouldn't trust somebody else's servers with information that would allow anyone who breaks in to take arbitrary amounts of money from me. (Amazon recently lost my business, because they will no longer let you just send a check for one purchase. They now want to store your checking account numbers. That's just as risky to me as giving them credit card numbers to store. No thanks. I'll find someone else to buy from.)
The insecurity of https does stop me from doing online banking, but I wouldn't be doing that anyway, because my bank is too small to set up their own online banking and chose to outsource it to some outfit operating out of an obscure archipelago in the Indian Ocean. I'm sure the outfit is legit and above-board or my bank wouldn't be using them, but I'm still not comfortable trusting my money to an outfit operating in a jurisdiction where I would have no real recourse if they ever caused me problems. So I don't do online banking. Small loss: my finances aren't that complicated, and the bank is a grand total of five blocks from my house.
When the reporter asks about the strip's legacy, Waterson talks about how fans remember the strip. I think that misses the point.
If I were asked about the legacy of Calvin and Hobbes, I would talk about some of the ways the better comic strips now are different from any of the comic strips in the eighties. I think Calvin and Hobbes has had a more substantial influence on other cartoonists and their work than probably any other single strip in the history of the funny papers.
> This "The pills must be working" strip has got to be phony
Yes, it's a fake. I have just about every C&H book including TCC&H, and I've never seen that strip before.
But it's just as funny and interesting and pointed as what you normally would expect from a C&H, and I think it fits the spirit of the strip nicely. The visual variation between the panels is very much not up to the typical C&H standard (in more ways than just the one you point out), but I think that fits well with what this particular strip is saying.
However, I'd like to see the author (actually, either the author of this strip, or Waterson, either way) write the rest of the storyline. Obviously, it has to end with Calvin not taking the pills any more. I'd like to see how it gets there. That could be quite interesting. Actually, I think that has the potential to be one of the better C&H storylines ever (which is going some), if it were well done.
BTW, Waterson did do some strips with no word bubbles, although they're not very common (excepting ones with no dialog at all, but that's different).
My numbers look different. I'm seeing IE6, IE7, Firefox, IE8, Chrome, and Safari in that order. All the other browsers (e.g., Opera, Konqueror) come in with lower numbers than Googlebot.
IE8 market share *is* increasing, and IE6 decreasing, but I haven't seen them switch places yet.
Though, it wouldn't surprise me very much if my users were behind the times. I also haven't yet seen the numbers for Vista and Seven (even if combined) rise above the level of Mac OS X, somewhere in the sub-1% range. I'm seeing 85% Windows XP, and most of the rest is Windows 98, and most of the rest after that is search indexers.
I think I have *one* regular user with an iPhone, a couple of Nokia phone users (exactly two different models), a small handful of Mac users, and a couple of Linux users. There's also at least one user with Windows Me, one with FreeBSD, and at least one Blackberry. (I happen to know who the Blackberry user is. Used to be a coworker.)
And no, I can't be absolutely certain of my user counts. But between the number of hits and some other stats that we keep, it's pretty obvious that most of the ones I've guessed at "one user" probably really are just one user. And it's entirely possible that one person is responsible for more than one of these categories (e.g., maybe the FreeBSD guy as a Nokia phone, who knows).
> What's with the "uselessly slow" commentary. The guy did
> it just to prove it could be done, which is pretty cool
You must be new here.
It was necessary to point out the slowness in order to forestall a whole lot of drooling, glossy-eyed posts about how obviously because of this OS X is going to completely take over the cellphone market; no, it isn't, Linux rules; yes, it is, Linux is a niche product; OS X will take over the Windows segment; no, Linux will take over that; et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad bedlam.
Pointing out that it's too slow to be practical does not imply that it isn't an interesting achievement from a technical standpoint. It just stops people from going over the top with enthusiastic excitement over the potential of this new technology to revolutionize the world.
> when's the last time you can remember someone [in a movie] using a mouse?
ISTR Montgomery Scott tries to use a mouse in STIV:TSFS. But he doesn't know how (too used to LCARS, apparently, and tries to use it like a microphone), so they tell him to just use the keyboard, which he thinks is "quaint". He then proceeds to already know all the keyboard shortcuts for and be an instant whiz at using some ancient proprietary chem-modeling software that practically nobody had heard of even when it was current.
Which, in terms of realism in movies, is pretty much par for the course.
But you know what Hollywood botches even worse than computers? History. And math. And science. And every other subject they touch. Don't even get me started on Hollywood theology.
I think all of the most *realistic* movies I've ever seen were actually *about* film-making. It appears to be the only thing anyone in Hollywood knows anything about.
> It requires some sort of introduction, at
> least a transliteration of the characters
> from the Greek to Latin alphabet.
For language learning, transliteration is usually a bad idea.
You may think, "I need this crutch", but what you actually need is to learn the native writing system of the language, and transliteration is a way of putting that off, which actually costs you time and effort. Transliteration almost invariably distorts the language in ways that make it harder to learn.
There are exceptions, but they mostly revolve around languages that have a shared heritage and are so phonetically similar that the fact that they have different writing systems in the first place is the result of some historical external, non-linguistic force (typically, politics). For example, transliterating Urdu into the Devanagari script doesn't distort the language very much. But this is the exception rather than the rule.
For instance, transliterating Greek into the Latin alphabet obscures the distinction between short and long vowels (particularly epsilon versus eta and omicron versus omega), which would make Greek morphology *really* confusing. Transliterating between writing systems that differ to a greater extent (such as attempting to represent freeform-syllable stress-timed English in one-consonant-per-syllable katakana) is worse.
Or did you mean, an explanation of what the different characters mean? That *is* quite helpful, perhaps essential. Definitely essential if you don't have direct access to native speakers.
> If all you have is a hammer, everything is going
> to kinda like oh my god look like a nail cuz
Actually, if all you have is Hammer, you're going to end up thinking Americans wear weird pants.
> (I'll overlook the emoticon, since this isn't a formal
/b/, you deserve to flunk out. If you aren't willing to learn to communicate in a professional tone, you can just go get a job stocking shelves or installing plumbing. The white-collar world doesn't have a place for you.
> paper, so I would argue it's less inappropriate here.)
Heck, a linguistically enlightened modern forward-thinking professor might even be willing to overlook an *occasional* emoticon in an otherwise literate academic paper, provided the emoticon is tastefully used and does not completely destroy the overall tone of the text.
But yeah, if your "academic paper" reads like something off of
And no, I don't buy that jazz about being raised in a bad environment and how it's all not your fault. You still have to decide whether to study hard or slack off, and that makes all the difference. I went to college with a guy who was raised in Detroit and was the first member of his family to attend school beyond twelfth grade. He had a little catching up to do at first, but he worked a little harder than average for a few months, and by the end of the first year he was doing just fine, getting roughly the same kinds of grades as the kids who'd gone to private high schools.
Is it a little easier sometimes if you're raised in an educated environment? Sure. But either way you have to be willing to learn, and to work at it a little, or you're sunk (unless you're some kind of super-genius with a photographic memory, but that's exceedingly rare).
Attitude is the real key. It's a personal choice you make. Either you decide "I'm willing to put in the effort to discipline myself and make my studies a priority so I can do as well as possible", or else you say "Bah, studying is for nerds. I'm going to play cards all night and then waltz into class five minutes late tomorrow morning without reviewing the chapter."
(Okay, sure, there's a middle ground where you manage to put in just enough effort to graduate, not quite "cum laude", more like "o laude", but you do graduate. Yeah, you could probably strike that balance. Do you really want to be mediocre and barely adequate? Is that really your goal in life? Emo?)
Yes, formal academic writing is different from casual speech. It has been that way for centuries. It's just something you have to learn if you want to do well in school. It won't be the only thing either. Get cracking.
For what it's worth, I'm not a big fan of most American comedy either.
The difference between British comedy and American comedy is, British comedy isn't funny because nobody understands it; whereas, American comedy isn't funny even though you can understand it just fine, even if you have roughly the same intelligence quotient as a jar of mayonnaise.
> Although I basically agree with this sentiment, one
> thing that should be considered is what someone does
> when the fail to get a license.
Well, when you put it that way...
What on earth do you think people did sixty years ago, when the average household had only one car instead of three or four? They didn't give up and die of starvation because "the food is too far away to walk", I can tell you that for free.
Use your imagination a little. There are some options.
I suspect the most popular choice, these days, would be to take some additional training and try again. (And if you can't see how additional driver's training would be beneficial for a lot of American drivers, you may not be paying close attention to how a lot of people drive.)
But there are other ways to go too. You can catch rides with other people and chip in for gas. Or you could walk; it's actually possible to walk *MUCH* farther than most Americans realize. (Although in small midwestern towns it can be pretty hard to walk more than two blocks without turning down free rides from passing motorists who recognize you, and turning down rides can offend people, so watch out for that.) You can get a bicycle for the summer time and a snowmobile for the winter time. You could get a horse and let your friends call you a redneck. (What do they know, anyway?) Build a scooter out of Lego. You might even make the slashdot front page as an added bonus. In a pinch, you could even (gasp, shock, horror) relocate to a residence more proximate to the places you need to go on a regular basis.
I shouldn't need to tell you how to get where you need to go. That's your business. Figure something out. Be resourceful. Use your head for something besides holding down your neck.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that very few people should have a driver's license. I'm only saying they should have to meet more stringent requirements in order to get and keep the license. Whether they want to bother to meet those requirements is up to them. The requirements should be serious enough to keep folks from taking the license (and the responsibility that it represents) so much for granted that they constantly do incredibly foolish and dangerous things while driving.
And the requirements should also be designed to ensure that the people who pass are, in general, actually capable of driving more or less safely. (Driving motor vehicles on the open road will never be *entirely* safe, granted. But I'm talking about a reasonable level of safe-driving capability.)
And if someone *does* still take the matter lightly and do something incredibly dangerous (such as preparing sashimi in the passenger seat while texting and reading a novel and, incidentally, driving down the freeway) then yeah, we should take their license away. The rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- in that order. You do not have the inalienable right to put other people's lives at risk just because you think multitasking makes you happier. Either pull off the road, or pay attention to your driving.
> I'm math-challenged, and find the
> spreadsheet easier to use, too.
I majored in math, and I find the spreadsheet easier to use for a lot of things too. Although, the calculator app opens faster, so I tend to use that when I just want to do a simple addition or such like. But for anything complicated, yeah, I'm generally going to go with the spreadsheet.
I think it mostly has to do with whether you already know (the basics of) how to use spreadsheets or not. If you don't happen to already know how to use spreadsheets, a calculator program is going to be easier to learn, because everyone under the age of fifty has used one of the physical real-world devices on which it's modeled.
Since the Japanese will be producing the 3D programming, we'll get to watch 3D segments of celebrities watching and reacting to 3D segments of celebrities eating and reacting to mundane foods. Have I got that about right?
Could be worse, I suppose. Could be British comedy.
If there were anybody out there *half* as interested in communicating as we are, they'd have found a way to contact us by now.
> Can you imagine the howl from GM if anybody managed
> to seriously propose that GM be liable for car
> accidents involving their vehicle?
What makes you think GM's going to still be around in 2025?
But yeah, robocars are legally impractical, because if even one robocar ever causes an accident (nevermind how many accidents they've prevented), the public outcry would be... significant.
My proposal is that we ramp up the requirements to obtain and hold a driver's license. Driver's licenses are dangerous in the wrong hands. Stop handing them out like candy. Make prospective drivers show that they can actually handle taking responsibility for the lives of everyone else on the road. It'll never be perfect, but we should be doing a lot better than we are doing currently.
> I also have this special amulet that keeps tigers from eating
> me. I've had it all my life and I've never been eaten by a tiger...
Heh. My dad gave my sister one of those when she was about five years old, only hers protected her from tigers *and* tornadoes. (She was afraid of tornadoes at the time, which is the main reason he gave it to her.) Any time she wasn't entirely sure it was working (say, when the weather got dark), he'd ask, "You haven't seen any tigers around, have you?" Nope? Must be working, then.
> Actually, you only need a license to drive on public roads.
Granted.
The other poster meant to imply the "on public roads" part when he said driving is a privilege rather than a right. So, sure, if you want to put in a driving track in your back yard and drive around and around on it (for recreational purposes, presumably), you don't need a license for that.
But a driver's license -- the "right" to drive on the public roads -- is a privilege that is granted only to people who pass the driving test, which theoretically is supposed to require them to demonstrate that they can drive safely.
The problem is, the requirements to obtain and hold a driver's license are far too lax, and so we license a lot of people for driving that we shouldn't, because they're not safe drivers at all. Among other things...
* The vision test is WAY too lax. They only ever ask you to read the second line up, but frankly even the bottom line is enormous boldface type. If your vision is even halfway good enough for driving, you should be able to read a line half the point size of the bottom one. Furthermore, the text is stationary, and you can stare at it for several seconds before answering, which is definitely not going to be possible on the road. The text should appear briefly and be moving the whole time.
* The driving test does not require you to demonstrate the ability to deal with adverse weather conditions, but the license allows you to drive under adverse weather conditions. IMO, if you want to be licensed to drive in non-ideal weather conditions, you should have to pass tests in the rain, in fog, and on slush.
* The driving test does not require you to demonstrate the ability to handle night-time visibility, but the license allows you to operate a vehicle on the public roads at night. IMO, you should have to pass a night-driving test, as well as a day-driving test, before receiving any kind of driver's license.
* The maneuverability test, although it is good as far as it goes, really only measures your ability to maneuver the vehicle at parking-lot speeds. There should be additional tests measuring your ability to maneuver the vehicle at faster speeds. (Obviously, the ones for different speeds would be different. You can't turn on a twelve-foot radius while backing up at highway speeds, nor should you try to.)
* Currently, you don't have to keep your record accident-free in order to continue to hold the license. This SHOULD be a requirement.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Basically, the requirements for holding a driver's license should be ratcheted up about three orders of magnitude. Unsafe drivers are the number one danger to Americans. Driving accidents kill more people in this country than cancer and terrorism combined. Driving on the public roads puts lives at risk. Prospective drivers should have to show that they can handle the responsibility.
> Different people can handle different levels of distraction.
> So, there should be tests. Depending on your score, you
> get to have (or not have) certain things in your vehicle,
> like radios, heaters, people, pets, phones, etc.
Too complicated.
I've got a simpler rule that would actually work: If you are involved in an accident, we take away your driving privileges. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, you do not drive any more, full stop.
You can then walk for the rest of your life, or take public transportation (if it's available in your area), or if you can afford it you can hire a full-time trained professional driver who will keep his attention on the driving.
It would have to actually be enforced, or people wouldn't take it seriously. But once about 5% of the population loses their driving privileges for life, people would start to realize that maybe they should pay attention to driving when they're driving.
And no, we can't give second chances, in general, because if we gave second chances, the people who hadn't had their first accident yet would think they didn't need to be careful. I suppose we could give second chances to people whose first accident was before they were eighteen, provided we make them wait until they're 25 or so to drive again. To a seventeen-year-old, "until I'm 25" seems virtually the same as "forever", so that would probably not hurt the motivational value very much.
And I suppose we could maybe give second chances, after 5 years or so, to people who are determined not to have been at-fault in the accident (e.g., Bob was sitting at a red light and was rear-ended). This somewhat weakens the motivation to pay attention, though. We don't really want people to think, "I just have to pay enough attention to avoid *causing* an accident." We want them to think, "I have to pay enough attention to *avoid* an accident." So my vote would be that everyone involved in the accident should never drive again. Heck, passengers too. Their lives are at risk already, why not put their driving privileges at risk too? Maybe then they'd stop distracting the driver. The roads are dangerous. You gotta pay attention.
> I've never seen any evidence, either in my testing or
> online, that Vista ran programs any slower than XP.
My limited experience with Vista suggests that it *starts up* slower than XP when you first turn it on.
Like XP, Vista goes ahead and displays a picture of your desktop several minutes before it's done doing all of its startup chores, so users who have just turned on the computer are tempted to believe that it's up and running and ready to use... but it's not. I'm pretty sure Microsoft added this "optimization" as an answer to complaints that earlier versions of Windows took too long to start up, but it's the opposite of progress. Windows now takes even longer to start up, but it shows you a non-interactive picture of the desktop while you wait just to tease you.
The only way to tell when it's really ready to use is either to keep clicking on things (which makes it take even longer and eventually lands you a whole bunch of unnecessary open windows) or to hover over certain parts of the would-be UI and watch the mouse pointer to see when it quits showing the hourglass/spinner/whatever wait pointer.
If someone doesn't understand this (and I can tell you for free that most end users don't get it), they could easily draw the conclusion that Vista is slower overall, because it makes them wait longer. Of course, that's not really program startup time they're waiting on; it's OS startup time. But many users don't understand the distinction.
These same users also often leave the load-at-system-start widgets turned on for a bunch of programs that no way ever should be loading at system start, so that exacerbates the problem even further for them. They're not just waiting for Windows; they're also waiting for Adobe Reader and Java and a bunch of other stuff that they don't use at all nine days out of ten, but it's starting up time they turn the computer on anyway.
Other systems (Debian, for instance) also take longer to start up than XP, but once you see the desktop, it doesn't take very long after that to become fully interactive. So it's easier to see the distinction between OS-startup time and UI responsiveness once the system is fully started.
If you turn a Windows computer on and go do something else for fifteen minutes and come back, it'll feel more responsive. That's true for XP as well as Vista.
The adverb "first" is redundant, actually, and therefore unnecessary. The same idea is adequately conveyed by the preposition "before".
> What the hell is Zune?
You don't want to know. Seriously, don't Google it. Also, don't look up "Microsoft Bob" either. Some things you're better off not knowing.
> If apple get's away with it, you know [Microsoft] will follow in their footsteps.
So what you're saying is, there's going to be a Zune store?
> Most spam I get is obviously a template,
> since I get the same one for weeks.
I get those, but I also get ones that appear to have been written by a Markov chain generator with 4chan as input.
> I don't know the entire history of the checklist
I'm pretty sure it comes from usenet originally and is older than email spam. I believe it may also be older than the web.
Well, it wouldn't work exactly the way you say, because the client PCs don't ask the router stuff like "give me the web page for http://www.slashdot.org/". It's more like "send this UDP packet to [IPv4 address of DNS server]" and then after a bit "send this TCP traffic to [IPv4 address of slashdot]".
So what the router would actually have to do is proxy everything, including DNS lookups. And when the client software tries to use a protocol that's newer than the router firmware, it'll fail, especially if the target system doesn't have an IPv4 address.
But the client systems aren't what's holding up IPv6 deployment at this point.
What's holding it up is, there are exactly zero services available via IPv6 that aren't also available via IPv4; whereas, there are *lots* of IPv4-only services available. So the demand for IPv4 is overwhelmingly larger than the demand for IPv6. So when an ISP runs the pros and cons for the question, "should we move our customers over to IPv6", the answer always comes back "Of course not, are you insane?"
The transition, when it does finally happen, will be most painful for people who for one reason or another can't be on both internets. As best I can figure, you'll have on one side people who can't get an IPv4 address because they're all given out already, and on the other side people whose ISP doesn't provide IPv6 support yet, or who are using old legacy software that doesn't support it. It probably won't be too bad at first, because most of the people who won't be able to get global IPv4 addresses will be just client systems, and they should at least be able get access to the IPv4 network via NAT. As long as *servers* can all get IPv4 addresses, we should be mostly okay for a while.
Not that there won't be problems, but it's not like the world's going to split in half with the IPv4 people and the IPv6 people totally unable to communicate with one another at all. Once there's a reason to do so, most people with IPv4 access will be able to get IPv6 as well, and like I said the IPv6 people will generally be able to access most IPv4 services via NAT.