> Sin taxes are stupid. They allow rich people to "sin" more.
But if they do, they bear a proportionally higher percentage of the tax burden. So such a system penalizes them for the "sin", in a directly fiscal way (which, typically, is a form of penalty that rich people are more worried about than poor people, though of course there are exceptions).
I'm not in favor of replacing all legal restrictions with taxes. I would not, for instance, want murder to be legal and taxed. But we're talking here about the "smoking is bad for you" sort of thing, an excise tax.
How about a sonic device, rear-mounted, that starts out at a volume that would just about be barely audible to the tailgater and then gets louder and louder the longer they sit on your tail? After five minutes or so, it should make their ears bleed...
The question is, should it play Brahms, a siren, or car dealership commercials?
Re:From the last Slashdot article and FYI:
on
Revisiting DIY HERF Guns
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> sometimes a person will pull into the left lane and either > maintain the same speed as the right lane (two-lane scenario, > for simplification), or so minimally faster that it will take > several miles before they pass the car on their right
That's passing-lane bunching, and it's not the same thing as tailgating. It *is* dangerous and stupid, but it's also somewhat understandable, and it only lasts for a minute or two on each occasion, so it doesn't make the person in front jumpy and nervous. All told, passing-lane bunching generally doesn't make people want to slam on their brakes and/or drop proximity mines out the back of their vehicles just to make it stop.
Tailgating does. Tailgating is when a motorist insists on driving mile after mile after mile so close to the rear bumper of whoever is in front of him that there's no way he could possibly slow down in time to avoid a collision if the vehicle in front of him needed to decelerate suddenly for any reason. This could theoretically be done in the left lane, but in practice it almost always occurs in the right lane.
It's one of the most dangerous driving behaviors known, short of outright inebriation (or doing various non-driving-related things, such as texting, while driving). Tailgating is a good deal worse than speeding, and arguably worse than passing in the right lane. It's right up there with passing through an intersection, brake-checking on the freeway, attempting to "pop wheelies", and similar bizarrely unsafe schenanighans.
I'm not sure any fate is too harsh for tailgaters, but I favor an approach that would either force them to reform or get them off the road if they won't: three-month license suspension on the first offense, three years on the second offense, and the license to drive permanently revoked on the third offense. Underage tailgaters could lose their license until they turn 18 and then have the record wiped clean, I suppose.
Re:From the last Slashdot article and FYI:
on
Revisiting DIY HERF Guns
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> For the person tailgating, well, that person is attempting > to bully you into driving the way he wants you to drive
I disagree with this assessment. Most tailgaters habitually drive on the tail of whoever happens to be in front of them, no matter *how* that person is driving. I haven't figured out *why* they do it, but I don't think it's because they're trying to elicit modified driving behavior from the person in front of them.
However, I suspect the other poster may have been thinking more in terms of what could go wrong for other motorists *behind* the tailgater, if they don't manage to get off the road as their engine dies. Leaving a stopped car on the freeway is a good way to cause an accident. Sure, the tailgater deserves worse, but you also should be thinking about the people behind him.
> I am not too proud to pull over and force a tailgater to pass me, for example
I usually look for a place where they have room to pass (no oncoming traffic, or a passing lane) and then slow down to a point where they feel they have no choice *but* to go around. This usually requires slowing down by at *least* 50%, sometimes more like 75%. This is one of the identifying features of a serious hardcore tailgater: they would rather go a good deal slower than be able to see any open road in front of them.
> when you order a Big Mac you know exactly what you're getting, > no matter if you are in New York, Bumfuck Oklahoma, or Syria.
Actually, that would be Coca-Cola. They sell exactly the same product everywhere.
McDonald's doesn't. On the contrary, they adapt their menu to fit local expectations and tastes. In Ecuador, the Big Mac has cabbage on it instead of lettuce, and the beef has a very different flavor due to being mountain-grazed rather than grain-fed. In India, they don't use beef at all. In the midwestern US, anything labeled as "spicy" is in fact quite bland. (For example, when I was working at McDs in the mid nineties, they had a "Cajun Chicken" sandwich. I'm pretty sure the strongest spice in it was a pinch of black pepper.)
> What does the Big Mac tell us about American civilization?
Well, it's a *standardized* item, made (pretty much) exactly the same way every time, at least in theory, and furthermore people who say otherwise (who say, for instance, that you don't know exactly what it's going to be like on any given occasion) generally do so because they are *criticizing* McDonald's, not praising them. You could probably write a book on what this says about American culture, but the basic jist of it would boil down to the fact that we value consistency and predictability. (This bears out if you look at our entertainment.)
Another thing about the Big Mac is that it's a commercial product brought to you by a multi-billion-dollar international corporation (or franchise licensees of said corporation).
But perhaps the most significant thing that the Big Mac says about American culture is that we really value convenience. Not only do we like to eat at restaurants (paying more money for inferior food rather than taking the time to cook), but furthermore we'll buy a prefab burger assembled by teenagers who make minimum wage if it means we don't have to get out of the car because they've got a drive-through. And we convince ourselves that we *like* it. That's how much we don't want to bother doing simple household domestic tasks (setting the table, cooking, washing dishes) on a day-to-day basis.
However, I probably would have said that the quintessential item in American cuisine is the casserole.
Statistically, the marital status of the parents is highly relevant to the child's prospects. Children whose parents are married to one another from prior to conception clear through until the child is an adult get on average much better grades in school, are significantly more likely to consistently hold down jobs as adults, make more money on average, are significantly less likely to have a criminal record, are less likely to be smokers, and so on and so forth. These are quite strong correlations.
Now, correlation is not causation. It's possible that the parent's strong marriage does not *cause* the child's good prospects and performance, but rather that both are caused by some of the same socioeconomic factors. But it's still very much relevant in a statistical study like this.
I was born in late December and stopped once I got my Bachelor's (but with a GPA significantly higher than 3.4) to pay off my student loans. I paid off the last of the loans within four years after graduation and have been continuously employed since. But these are just individual data points, and the slashdot readership is by no means a random sample of the population in any case.
> For that matter, its just as well possible to run Linux as root to do your > everyday things... it's not the OS's fault; it's the users fault
Bunk.
I mean, in theory, yes, that would be true, if Windows had for the last twenty years shipped with an installer and typical OEM OOTB setups that encouraged the creation of a non-admin account for everyday use. If that had been the case, then third-party application developers would have programmed under the assumption that the user might not be admin and would test their junk using non-admin accounts, and so most common applications would work just fine if the user is not admin.
But in fact that is not the case. The advent of UAC in Vista and Seven is helping somewhat, but even now the default setup is wrong (the user has admin privs and only has to frob "yes", not type a password), and an annoyingly high percentage of Windows applications out there simply do not run correctly unless the user either has admin privileges outright (WinXP) or grants them to the app via UAC (Vista/Seven). Some of these applications can be worked around if the admin does peculiar things with access control lists, but others really do want the logged-in user to have full admin privs, or else stuff doesn't work right. The ISVs who are guilty of this include some pretty major names, not least Symantec. Why should antivirus software care whether there even *is* a user logged in when it does a scan or update, much less what the logged-in user's privilege level is? Because earlier versions of the software ran on Win9x, that's why.
And that's why a Linux-based system (or BSD or any Unix-type system really) is different: not because the kernel is different now, but because the application base isn't built on a legacy of decades of complete disregard for the whole concept of security and permissions.
Did I mention too that Windows itself requires the user to have admin privileges for Windows Update to work right? Otherwise, Automatic Updates only work until something with a EULA comes along (every third update, roughly), and then the system gets no further updates until someone logs in as admin. Again, UAC helps somewhat, but somebody with the admin password still has to put in an appearance on every workstation on the network, about once a month, in order to keep all the systems up to date. There's no such thing as putting updates on a cron job and forgetting about them.
Not sure what any of this has to do with Chrome Frame, though.
Actually, they could be useful for that. A computer program can obviously tell you whether the source code is syntactically valid, just for starters, and for most undergraduate programming assignments it can also tell you whether the code yields the correct results for a collection of arbitrary test data. It could even do performance benchmarks.
It can't tell you whether the code is clear and maintainable and well-documented, but I never had a programming class where they reached the point of grading for that stuff anyway. Usually they were just happy if your program did what it was supposed to do. And a computer can check that.
Orwell is an interesting read, but everything he knew about linguistics could be written on a 3x5 card.
Fundamentally, you can't make a word mean only certain things by excising other meanings from the dictionary, because on the whole readers don't learn most of their vocabulary from dictionaries, but from other written material. Thus words acquire meaning based on how they are used in practice.
> more often than not such programs flag > perfectly acceptable usage as erroneous
If that were the worst of it, they might actually be useful.
But in fact automated grammar correction software frequently *introduces* error into otherwise correct material. If the starting text is of even mediocre quality, the software actively makes it worse.
> I remember being taught a very formulaic way of writing essays
Obviously, the formulaic essays are not of high quality, and a good writer must move beyond the formula. An essay writer who follows the formula is never going to stand out from the crowd, because lack of imagination does not make for interesting reading. Nevertheless, the formula is taught in school for a good reason: it is a starting point, and a didactic tool.
Among other things the five-paragraph essay formula teaches the novice writer to order his thoughts into a logical structure, centered around a small number of major points that the reader will hopefully be able to remember; to enumerate these points and discuss them individually in turn; to introduce the topic before delving into the details; to summarize what he's saying and draw a conclusion; and to write transitions. These are all important and necessary skills, skills which a good writer continues to use long after he has shed the formal constraints of the formula itself.
> As a writing instructor, let me put it this way: I very, > very seldom see a paper with misspellings and grammar > mistakes that is nonetheless a well-written paper. It > happens, but not often.
It happens most often when the writer is not a native speaker of the language. They'll write an essentially sound paper but make weird and obvious mistakes, like using the wrong preposition or spelling ph words with f. Depending on their native language they may also make other kinds of mistakes, e.g., Japanese people will frequently mess up grammatical number.
But the other poster may have been talking about grammatical structures that are actually a regular part of English grammar but are nonetheless consistently marked down by many English teachers, for obscure reasons. Examples of this kind of thing include split infinitives, the second-person imperative, the use of the second person pronoun to refer to anyone in general, and the use of objective-case pronoun forms in the predicate after certain verbs (particularly being verbs). Linguistically speaking these aren't actually mistakes as such, and in fact some of the contortions used to avoid them actively impede clarity, but they frequently get marked as "mistakes" nonetheless.
Personally I like the inheritance model that Inform uses. Rather than being designed around some kind of theoretical purity, it's designed to facilitate code re-use to the greatest extent possible. It's a bit different and takes some getting used to, but it's amazingly convenient. So a class or object can inherit properties (including code as well as other data) from multiple classes, and any conflicts are resolved based on the declared order. Like I said, it's a bit different (a C++ programmer would probably be hopelessly confused at first), but it's amazingly *practical*. Being able to alter an individual object's properties at runtime, including code (the code has to pre-exist, but you can assign a different routine to a property than the one it started with), is also quite useful.
> My Pentium 90 took something like 20-30 seconds to boot to the DOS prompt.
Yeah, that was a bad era for BIOSes.
My ITT XTRA (an 8086-based system that I think ran at 4.77 MHz) could boot to a DOS prompt in under thirty seconds even when loading the OS from a 360K floppy, with a bunch of mostly unnecessary junk in config.sys and autoexec.bat.
Of course, the BIOS had less hardware initialization to do back then. Your Pentium 90 probably had to deal with Plug-and-Pray, among other things.
Also, the XTRA was made in the days before CMOS-based firmware, so the BIOS was actually hardwired. I'm not sure if that really has any technical relevance for its loading speed, but I strongly suspect it motivated simpler and more efficient BIOS code.
The real problem is speed, or rather the lack thereof. Air travel became as popular as it is because it's so much *faster*. People might book an airship flight once a decade for the novelty, kind of like a cruise ship trip, but they're not going to hop on the blimp whenever they need to get to the other side of the country. The trip would take too long. Jets are faster, so they win.
No. When used in the attributive position, the unit labels on such quantities are given in the singular form, whether it's a 250-foot airship, a seven-mile trip, a twenty-dollar entree, or a three-day conference.
Now, if you put it in the predicate, then you use the plural form: the airship is 250 feet long, the trip is seven miles, the entree costs twenty dollars, or the conference lasts three days.
If you have more questions like this about English grammar and usage, I'm available on Lang-8 (same username as here). HTH.HAND.
Does this make sense to anyone else? Sure, let's pick the most universally loathed MS Office feature since Clippit and introduce it to a web browser because, umm, it's more "modern". Gah.
I'm not even going to bother arguing for the ability to turn this nonsense the heck off. If they actually implement it, I'm just going to figure the Firefox team has completely lost their way, and I'll switch to another browser entirely, on every computer I administer, both in my household and at work.
I don't know yet which one I'll go with. But I know it won't be any trouble at all finding one whose dev team has better sense than to immitate the Office 97 ribbon interface.
But I *am* confident that I could find a job if I needed to. Currently I *have* a job, one that I actually like, so it's a theoretical exercise at the moment. But the prospect of needing to find a job holds no fear for me. I may not be "top-flight", but I'm competent and punctual and have a four-year degree and more than nine years' real-world experience and a resume that if anything makes me overqualified for the job I'm currently working.
My education is sufficiently general to probably let me work in a field other than IT if I decide I want to go in a different direction, although my qualifications are strongest in technology training and especially network administration.
And I am adding to my resume all the time, things that I learn as a part of my job. Perl (to a significant level of fluency), a much better understanding of CSS, DBI, MySQL, Postgres, MS SQL Server, virtual domains (in web hosting), Reporting Services, Visual Studio, Javascript and the W3C DOM, AJAX, a more thorough understanding of firewall rulesets... the list of stuff I've learned in my current job just goes on and on. (Maybe that's why I've enjoyed this job so much.) Right now I'm learning Active Directory, something I've never messed with before. I'll be migrating an AD domain to a different PDC some time in October, and I'm thinking of maybe doing some group policy objects for the first time as well.
> Creditors who are expecting your monthly payments on > time for credit cards, rent, house payments, car payments, > and so forth don't take your knowledge and skills in > lieu of payment. Only a fool walks away from his current > employer without first securing a position at another,
I would say only a fool (or someone fresh out of school) has such a wealth of creditors and dearth of assets that he cannot survive three months without a job. (And yes, sometimes you might have to take a job that pays a little less and adjust your budget to compensate, at least in the short term. It's better than staying in a job you hate.) If you place a modest 10% of your income into savings each month, in just three years you've got three and a half months' worth of income put back. And if you think you can't live on 90% of your income, you either have large outstanding debts or a complete lack of creativity, maybe both.
Granted, it's also advisable to go ahead and find the new job before quitting the old one. I was hired in my current job before I quit the previous one, and that was nice. I recommend this practice.
But that doesn't mean you're locked into your current job indefinitely if it's bad. Hey, the grass on the other side of the fence may not be that much greener, but at least it might be a change of pace.
> especially in this economy.
All of this is true pretty much regardless of whether the economy is currently experiencing an up cycle or a recession.
> Well, "Top-Flight" Admins may not necessarily exist but "Bottom of the > Barrel" Admins sure do. It may not be easy initially to spot the difference.
Oh, a good network administrator can tell the difference. You just concoct a common trouble-shooting scenario and see how they do.
Example: Here, these are charts depicting the inner and outer firewall rulesets, and this is a diagram of our network at the physical layer, and here's a logical diagram of the IP layer, and here's a shelving diagram for the server room showing which server is what. Now, you're at home on Saturday morning, and [non-IT coworker] calls and says, "The printers are down! Nobody can print!" What is your response?
If they don't ask which _specific_ printers have been tried, you show them the door. If they don't bother asking about the indicator lights on the printers, you show them the door. If they don't consult the network diagram and notice that both of the printers that have a problem are connected via the same four-port switch, you show them the door. If they don't know to try power-cycling the switch, you show them the door.
If they successfully navigate that one, you congratulate them and then give them one that's a little harder to figure out based on the symptoms, like a denial-of-service attack on the DNS server. ("You're at home on a Saturday morning and they call and say, 'The internet is broken.' What do you say?") If they get that one okay, they're not bottom-of-the-barrel.
Slashdot Mirror
> Sin taxes are stupid. They allow rich people to "sin" more.
But if they do, they bear a proportionally higher percentage of the tax burden. So such a system penalizes them for the "sin", in a directly fiscal way (which, typically, is a form of penalty that rich people are more worried about than poor people, though of course there are exceptions).
I'm not in favor of replacing all legal restrictions with taxes. I would not, for instance, want murder to be legal and taxed. But we're talking here about the "smoking is bad for you" sort of thing, an excise tax.
> Are you always far enough back to safely stop if
> the car ahead of you suddenly rolls or spins out?
Yes. To do otherwise would be dangerous and stupid.
The only exception is when somebody has *just* pulled in front of me; it takes a few seconds to safely re-establish proper following distance.
How about a sonic device, rear-mounted, that starts out at a volume that would just about be barely audible to the tailgater and then gets louder and louder the longer they sit on your tail? After five minutes or so, it should make their ears bleed...
The question is, should it play Brahms, a siren, or car dealership commercials?
> sometimes a person will pull into the left lane and either
> maintain the same speed as the right lane (two-lane scenario,
> for simplification), or so minimally faster that it will take
> several miles before they pass the car on their right
That's passing-lane bunching, and it's not the same thing as tailgating. It *is* dangerous and stupid, but it's also somewhat understandable, and it only lasts for a minute or two on each occasion, so it doesn't make the person in front jumpy and nervous. All told, passing-lane bunching generally doesn't make people want to slam on their brakes and/or drop proximity mines out the back of their vehicles just to make it stop.
Tailgating does. Tailgating is when a motorist insists on driving mile after mile after mile so close to the rear bumper of whoever is in front of him that there's no way he could possibly slow down in time to avoid a collision if the vehicle in front of him needed to decelerate suddenly for any reason. This could theoretically be done in the left lane, but in practice it almost always occurs in the right lane.
It's one of the most dangerous driving behaviors known, short of outright inebriation (or doing various non-driving-related things, such as texting, while driving). Tailgating is a good deal worse than speeding, and arguably worse than passing in the right lane. It's right up there with passing through an intersection, brake-checking on the freeway, attempting to "pop wheelies", and similar bizarrely unsafe schenanighans.
I'm not sure any fate is too harsh for tailgaters, but I favor an approach that would either force them to reform or get them off the road if they won't: three-month license suspension on the first offense, three years on the second offense, and the license to drive permanently revoked on the third offense. Underage tailgaters could lose their license until they turn 18 and then have the record wiped clean, I suppose.
> For the person tailgating, well, that person is attempting
> to bully you into driving the way he wants you to drive
I disagree with this assessment. Most tailgaters habitually drive on the tail of whoever happens to be in front of them, no matter *how* that person is driving. I haven't figured out *why* they do it, but I don't think it's because they're trying to elicit modified driving behavior from the person in front of them.
However, I suspect the other poster may have been thinking more in terms of what could go wrong for other motorists *behind* the tailgater, if they don't manage to get off the road as their engine dies. Leaving a stopped car on the freeway is a good way to cause an accident. Sure, the tailgater deserves worse, but you also should be thinking about the people behind him.
> I am not too proud to pull over and force a tailgater to pass me, for example
I usually look for a place where they have room to pass (no oncoming traffic, or a passing lane) and then slow down to a point where they feel they have no choice *but* to go around. This usually requires slowing down by at *least* 50%, sometimes more like 75%. This is one of the identifying features of a serious hardcore tailgater: they would rather go a good deal slower than be able to see any open road in front of them.
> when you order a Big Mac you know exactly what you're getting,
> no matter if you are in New York, Bumfuck Oklahoma, or Syria.
Actually, that would be Coca-Cola. They sell exactly the same product everywhere.
McDonald's doesn't. On the contrary, they adapt their menu to fit local expectations and tastes. In Ecuador, the Big Mac has cabbage on it instead of lettuce, and the beef has a very different flavor due to being mountain-grazed rather than grain-fed. In India, they don't use beef at all. In the midwestern US, anything labeled as "spicy" is in fact quite bland. (For example, when I was working at McDs in the mid nineties, they had a "Cajun Chicken" sandwich. I'm pretty sure the strongest spice in it was a pinch of black pepper.)
> What does the Big Mac tell us about American civilization?
Well, it's a *standardized* item, made (pretty much) exactly the same way every time, at least in theory, and furthermore people who say otherwise (who say, for instance, that you don't know exactly what it's going to be like on any given occasion) generally do so because they are *criticizing* McDonald's, not praising them. You could probably write a book on what this says about American culture, but the basic jist of it would boil down to the fact that we value consistency and predictability. (This bears out if you look at our entertainment.)
Another thing about the Big Mac is that it's a commercial product brought to you by a multi-billion-dollar international corporation (or franchise licensees of said corporation).
But perhaps the most significant thing that the Big Mac says about American culture is that we really value convenience. Not only do we like to eat at restaurants (paying more money for inferior food rather than taking the time to cook), but furthermore we'll buy a prefab burger assembled by teenagers who make minimum wage if it means we don't have to get out of the car because they've got a drive-through. And we convince ourselves that we *like* it. That's how much we don't want to bother doing simple household domestic tasks (setting the table, cooking, washing dishes) on a day-to-day basis.
However, I probably would have said that the quintessential item in American cuisine is the casserole.
> Unwed? What is this, 1950?
Statistically, the marital status of the parents is highly relevant to the child's prospects. Children whose parents are married to one another from prior to conception clear through until the child is an adult get on average much better grades in school, are significantly more likely to consistently hold down jobs as adults, make more money on average, are significantly less likely to have a criminal record, are less likely to be smokers, and so on and so forth. These are quite strong correlations.
Now, correlation is not causation. It's possible that the parent's strong marriage does not *cause* the child's good prospects and performance, but rather that both are caused by some of the same socioeconomic factors. But it's still very much relevant in a statistical study like this.
I was born in late December and stopped once I got my Bachelor's (but with a GPA significantly higher than 3.4) to pay off my student loans. I paid off the last of the loans within four years after graduation and have been continuously employed since. But these are just individual data points, and the slashdot readership is by no means a random sample of the population in any case.
> For that matter, its just as well possible to run Linux as root to do your ... it's not the OS's fault; it's the users fault
> everyday things
Bunk.
I mean, in theory, yes, that would be true, if Windows had for the last twenty years shipped with an installer and typical OEM OOTB setups that encouraged the creation of a non-admin account for everyday use. If that had been the case, then third-party application developers would have programmed under the assumption that the user might not be admin and would test their junk using non-admin accounts, and so most common applications would work just fine if the user is not admin.
But in fact that is not the case. The advent of UAC in Vista and Seven is helping somewhat, but even now the default setup is wrong (the user has admin privs and only has to frob "yes", not type a password), and an annoyingly high percentage of Windows applications out there simply do not run correctly unless the user either has admin privileges outright (WinXP) or grants them to the app via UAC (Vista/Seven). Some of these applications can be worked around if the admin does peculiar things with access control lists, but others really do want the logged-in user to have full admin privs, or else stuff doesn't work right. The ISVs who are guilty of this include some pretty major names, not least Symantec. Why should antivirus software care whether there even *is* a user logged in when it does a scan or update, much less what the logged-in user's privilege level is? Because earlier versions of the software ran on Win9x, that's why.
And that's why a Linux-based system (or BSD or any Unix-type system really) is different: not because the kernel is different now, but because the application base isn't built on a legacy of decades of complete disregard for the whole concept of security and permissions.
Did I mention too that Windows itself requires the user to have admin privileges for Windows Update to work right? Otherwise, Automatic Updates only work until something with a EULA comes along (every third update, roughly), and then the system gets no further updates until someone logs in as admin. Again, UAC helps somewhat, but somebody with the admin password still has to put in an appearance on every workstation on the network, about once a month, in order to keep all the systems up to date. There's no such thing as putting updates on a cron job and forgetting about them.
Not sure what any of this has to do with Chrome Frame, though.
> Computers can't even grade source code.
Actually, they could be useful for that. A computer program can obviously tell you whether the source code is syntactically valid, just for starters, and for most undergraduate programming assignments it can also tell you whether the code yields the correct results for a collection of arbitrary test data. It could even do performance benchmarks.
It can't tell you whether the code is clear and maintainable and well-documented, but I never had a programming class where they reached the point of grading for that stuff anyway. Usually they were just happy if your program did what it was supposed to do. And a computer can check that.
Doubleplusunlikely.
Orwell is an interesting read, but everything he knew about linguistics could be written on a 3x5 card.
Fundamentally, you can't make a word mean only certain things by excising other meanings from the dictionary, because on the whole readers don't learn most of their vocabulary from dictionaries, but from other written material. Thus words acquire meaning based on how they are used in practice.
> more often than not such programs flag
> perfectly acceptable usage as erroneous
If that were the worst of it, they might actually be useful.
But in fact automated grammar correction software frequently *introduces* error into otherwise correct material. If the starting text is of even mediocre quality, the software actively makes it worse.
> I remember being taught a very formulaic way of writing essays
Obviously, the formulaic essays are not of high quality, and a good writer must move beyond the formula. An essay writer who follows the formula is never going to stand out from the crowd, because lack of imagination does not make for interesting reading. Nevertheless, the formula is taught in school for a good reason: it is a starting point, and a didactic tool.
Among other things the five-paragraph essay formula teaches the novice writer to order his thoughts into a logical structure, centered around a small number of major points that the reader will hopefully be able to remember; to enumerate these points and discuss them individually in turn; to introduce the topic before delving into the details; to summarize what he's saying and draw a conclusion; and to write transitions. These are all important and necessary skills, skills which a good writer continues to use long after he has shed the formal constraints of the formula itself.
> As a writing instructor, let me put it this way: I very,
> very seldom see a paper with misspellings and grammar
> mistakes that is nonetheless a well-written paper. It
> happens, but not often.
It happens most often when the writer is not a native speaker of the language. They'll write an essentially sound paper but make weird and obvious mistakes, like using the wrong preposition or spelling ph words with f. Depending on their native language they may also make other kinds of mistakes, e.g., Japanese people will frequently mess up grammatical number.
But the other poster may have been talking about grammatical structures that are actually a regular part of English grammar but are nonetheless consistently marked down by many English teachers, for obscure reasons. Examples of this kind of thing include split infinitives, the second-person imperative, the use of the second person pronoun to refer to anyone in general, and the use of objective-case pronoun forms in the predicate after certain verbs (particularly being verbs). Linguistically speaking these aren't actually mistakes as such, and in fact some of the contortions used to avoid them actively impede clarity, but they frequently get marked as "mistakes" nonetheless.
> if it sounds like something is approaching or entering the lair
> most animals will quickly transition from sleep to fully awake.
Strangely enough, I sleep right through that, but anything that sounds even vaguely like a power disruption wakes me up instantly.
> Reagan was noted as a not a hard working president,
> early to bed, late to rise type guy.
Smart man.
(Before he came down with the Alzheimer's, I mean.)
Personally I like the inheritance model that Inform uses. Rather than being designed around some kind of theoretical purity, it's designed to facilitate code re-use to the greatest extent possible. It's a bit different and takes some getting used to, but it's amazingly convenient. So a class or object can inherit properties (including code as well as other data) from multiple classes, and any conflicts are resolved based on the declared order. Like I said, it's a bit different (a C++ programmer would probably be hopelessly confused at first), but it's amazingly *practical*. Being able to alter an individual object's properties at runtime, including code (the code has to pre-exist, but you can assign a different routine to a property than the one it started with), is also quite useful.
> My Pentium 90 took something like 20-30 seconds to boot to the DOS prompt.
Yeah, that was a bad era for BIOSes.
My ITT XTRA (an 8086-based system that I think ran at 4.77 MHz) could boot to a DOS prompt in under thirty seconds even when loading the OS from a 360K floppy, with a bunch of mostly unnecessary junk in config.sys and autoexec.bat.
Of course, the BIOS had less hardware initialization to do back then. Your Pentium 90 probably had to deal with Plug-and-Pray, among other things.
Also, the XTRA was made in the days before CMOS-based firmware, so the BIOS was actually hardwired. I'm not sure if that really has any technical relevance for its loading speed, but I strongly suspect it motivated simpler and more efficient BIOS code.
The real problem is speed, or rather the lack thereof. Air travel became as popular as it is because it's so much *faster*. People might book an airship flight once a decade for the novelty, kind of like a cruise ship trip, but they're not going to hop on the blimp whenever they need to get to the other side of the country. The trip would take too long. Jets are faster, so they win.
No. When used in the attributive position, the unit labels on such quantities are given in the singular form, whether it's a 250-foot airship, a seven-mile trip, a twenty-dollar entree, or a three-day conference.
Now, if you put it in the predicate, then you use the plural form: the airship is 250 feet long, the trip is seven miles, the entree costs twenty dollars, or the conference lasts three days.
If you have more questions like this about English grammar and usage, I'm available on Lang-8 (same username as here). HTH.HAND.
Does this make sense to anyone else? Sure, let's pick the most universally loathed MS Office feature since Clippit and introduce it to a web browser because, umm, it's more "modern". Gah.
I'm not even going to bother arguing for the ability to turn this nonsense the heck off. If they actually implement it, I'm just going to figure the Firefox team has completely lost their way, and I'll switch to another browser entirely, on every computer I administer, both in my household and at work.
I don't know yet which one I'll go with. But I know it won't be any trouble at all finding one whose dev team has better sense than to immitate the Office 97 ribbon interface.
> How many of us are actually "top-flight"?
... the list of stuff I've learned in my current job just goes on and on. (Maybe that's why I've enjoyed this job so much.) Right now I'm learning Active Directory, something I've never messed with before. I'll be migrating an AD domain to a different PDC some time in October, and I'm thinking of maybe doing some group policy objects for the first time as well.
I'm not.
But I *am* confident that I could find a job if I needed to. Currently I *have* a job, one that I actually like, so it's a theoretical exercise at the moment. But the prospect of needing to find a job holds no fear for me. I may not be "top-flight", but I'm competent and punctual and have a four-year degree and more than nine years' real-world experience and a resume that if anything makes me overqualified for the job I'm currently working.
My education is sufficiently general to probably let me work in a field other than IT if I decide I want to go in a different direction, although my qualifications are strongest in technology training and especially network administration.
And I am adding to my resume all the time, things that I learn as a part of my job. Perl (to a significant level of fluency), a much better understanding of CSS, DBI, MySQL, Postgres, MS SQL Server, virtual domains (in web hosting), Reporting Services, Visual Studio, Javascript and the W3C DOM, AJAX, a more thorough understanding of firewall rulesets
> Creditors who are expecting your monthly payments on
> time for credit cards, rent, house payments, car payments,
> and so forth don't take your knowledge and skills in
> lieu of payment. Only a fool walks away from his current
> employer without first securing a position at another,
I would say only a fool (or someone fresh out of school) has such a wealth of creditors and dearth of assets that he cannot survive three months without a job. (And yes, sometimes you might have to take a job that pays a little less and adjust your budget to compensate, at least in the short term. It's better than staying in a job you hate.) If you place a modest 10% of your income into savings each month, in just three years you've got three and a half months' worth of income put back. And if you think you can't live on 90% of your income, you either have large outstanding debts or a complete lack of creativity, maybe both.
Granted, it's also advisable to go ahead and find the new job before quitting the old one. I was hired in my current job before I quit the previous one, and that was nice. I recommend this practice.
But that doesn't mean you're locked into your current job indefinitely if it's bad. Hey, the grass on the other side of the fence may not be that much greener, but at least it might be a change of pace.
> especially in this economy.
All of this is true pretty much regardless of whether the economy is currently experiencing an up cycle or a recession.
> Well, "Top-Flight" Admins may not necessarily exist but "Bottom of the
> Barrel" Admins sure do. It may not be easy initially to spot the difference.
Oh, a good network administrator can tell the difference. You just concoct a common trouble-shooting scenario and see how they do.
Example:
Here, these are charts depicting the inner and outer firewall rulesets, and this is a diagram of our network at the physical layer, and here's a logical diagram of the IP layer, and here's a shelving diagram for the server room showing which server is what. Now, you're at home on Saturday morning, and [non-IT coworker] calls and says, "The printers are down! Nobody can print!" What is your response?
If they don't ask which _specific_ printers have been tried, you show them the door. If they don't bother asking about the indicator lights on the printers, you show them the door. If they don't consult the network diagram and notice that both of the printers that have a problem are connected via the same four-port switch, you show them the door. If they don't know to try power-cycling the switch, you show them the door.
If they successfully navigate that one, you congratulate them and then give them one that's a little harder to figure out based on the symptoms, like a denial-of-service attack on the DNS server. ("You're at home on a Saturday morning and they call and say, 'The internet is broken.' What do you say?") If they get that one okay, they're not bottom-of-the-barrel.
HTH.HAND.