So what is the rule for forming the adjective? We can form (at least) two hypotheses:
Add the sound -ly to the end of the noun except in various exceptional cases. In particular, crumb is a really weird one-off exception because you add a -bly to the end.
Add the sound -ly to the end of the noun except for various exceptions. Crubmly is not an exception but we have to adopt the general rule that -mb at the end of a word is pronounced with a silent 'b'.
The second rule is probably better because it doesn't make a special case exception of crumb. And what's nice is that the spelling of crumb, despite having a silent -b, makes some kind of logical sense. If we spelled 'crumb' as 'crum', we'd be reflecting the first rule, and 'crumbly' would be a weird exception.
The point is that English spelling often reflects some underlying regularity when you look at the bigger picture. If you wanted to fix English spelling you'd probably need to 'fix' English grammar in order to remove a bunch of spurious spelling rules. That's pretty unlikely to happen, and neither should it.
The contract is between the people, collectively, and the government.
So I would incur obligations because someone else has entered into this contract? This is a horrible abuse of the word contract. I few problems with the constitutional democracy you describe. But I do have big problems with it being labeled a 'contract'.
Re:Richard Feynman's Paper on the Challenger Disas
on
Shuttle Launch Success
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
engineers tend to over-dramatize the risks
Consider the question: "what is an acceptable risk?". The important point is that there is no correct answer to this question. When you decide whether or not to take a risk you usually perform a cost-benefit analysis (even if it's a trivial one like "just one more drink won't do me any harm") and that analysis is a function of your costs and your benefits. Those costs and benefits differ between people, and between groups of people. Engineers and management have quite different "utility functions" expressing the relative values of these costs and benefits. Accusing engineers of "over-dramatization" is like an English-speaking person accusing a French-speaking of "over-dramatizing" the value of a French dictionary, something that is clearly useless to an English-speaking person.
The government of the US is explicitly a contract between the people and the state
The following questions aren't intended to be read as having an anti-US subtext.
When do Americans sign this contract? What happens to people who decide not to sign this contract? What room do individual Americans have to negotiate the precise terms of this contract? What happens to Americans who renege on this contract?
Some populations in Polynesia, Australia, New Guinea and South America, say, almost certainly have members who share no ancestry with the rest of the world.
If you think that insurance rates are wrong, set up your own insurance companies. Any inefficiency in your pricing is an opportunity for an insurance company to make money by addressing those inefficiencies.
But you'll do no such thing. I suspect you're simply mean spirited and jealous.
This list is ridiculous. It just displays people's prejudices (eg. they didn't even open Irritating Stick).
The absolute worst game ever is Pong. Even the name is stupid - as bad as calling a game Stink or Smell. It's meant to be some kind of tennis game. I daren't actually call it tennis though - the rules are completely wrong and there's no attempt to simulate the net. The rendering is stupendously bad - the ball isn't even round, it's a white square! And the bats or rackets are merely white rectangles. Even the scores are written with blocky text.
The controls are about as primitive as you can get - usually a rotary controller that allows you to move your racket up or down in one dimension. The sound effects have to be heard to be believed - they are merely beeps each time a ball is hit. No attempt at any kind of simulation. The physics is completely trivial. There is almost no opportunity for the exercise of any kind of skill.
Of course Pong will have its apologists. People who will say it's as good as the technology allowed it to be. Sure, it was good for its day (which isn't saying much, there was no competition at the time so no motivation to actually do anything good), but objectively it was the worst game ever made. It sold purely because nobody had seen any video game before, not because it had any inherently good qualities. Some engineer scraped together the bare minimum device that could be called a 'game' given the technology that was available. And believe me, it truly is the bare minimum of a game. The graphics make the rendering in every single game in the bottom 50 list look like the best painting of the Renaissance. Pointing a flashlight at a wall and making the spot of light go up and down probably has as much right to be called a video game and it's about as much fun.
And just in case you're too young to have played this game on a console, you can play it online here. I think you'll see I haven't exaggerated one bit.
This is the UK we're talking about here. By coffee they probably mean instant Nescafé. No, that'd be London. This is as far as you can get from London in the South West. So we're probably talking about instant coffee from some non-name brand, the equivalent of Rola Cola. Whatever, it's probably not worth traveling there for either the coffee or the internet connection. Probably nice scenery though.
I hope you notice the contradiction between the recent Slashdot story about a simulation of 1000 identical atoms, and how that was cutting edge research, and yet protein folding simulations require the simulation of many more atoms with a wider variety of more complex interactions.
I'm all for blue sky research. But I hate to see people taking what they perceive as the moral high ground for going with folding@home, which is speculative research, not a way to cure diseases.
I used to work in computational chemistry for Glaxo.* (regexp because I can't track the company's name changes since I left). After two years there I became strongly convinced that computers do not find cures for diseases - or even give you much understanding of illnesses. Molecular modeling is so far from being able to model in vivo molecules that it's practically worthless. One time I joked that people might was yell try to design molecules using yarrow stalks and the I Ching and then a few weeks later we took delivery of a piece of software that was practically the same thing - it generated random molecules (using a ball and stick model) that fitted within a defined volume of space. This stuff is nonsense. It tells you little about how molecules will behave in a real person.
One time my manager showed me some statistics for drug discovery. Drugs need to go through various rounds of testing: it might start with assays with just receptors, move up through animal tests to full blown clinical trials. He showed me two interesting facts: firstly, the correlation between success at one stage and success at the next stage was low. This meant that the correlation between the earliest stages and the final in vivo drug activity was tiny. Secondly, the best drugs were often outliers in the sense that you could often discern some kind of pattern allowing you to predict drug activity for a class of molecule, but that the good drugs fell way outside this pattern. Because activity levels predicted from simulation are so poorly correlated with the first stage of drug trials, and we already know that trials at this stage are poorly correlated with actual drug usefulness, simulations are just as much a waste of resources as SETI.
It seems to me that molecular modeling is actually one of those hard 'macho' (but ultimately pointless) projects that gets funding because to criticize it makes you seem anti-drug, anti-therapy and ant-human-progress.
(I'm not saying people shouldn't try to model molecules. This is a great blue-sky goal. But people who are trying to find drugs or therapies shouldn't be wasting their time with such techniques.)
And now I can explain my sig. I've never known anyone who acted like the creator of the universe was actually watching them. Merely a picture of some eyes has a stronger effect on people than an allmighty omniscient deity who can track every thought, let alone action. It's pretty obvious that nobody actually believes in a deity like this.
I've experienced all kinds of things blocking out the sun - clouds, trees, tall houses, annoying people who decide to set up camp right in front of you on the beach, but never scientists. On the whole, scientists tend not to be all that gregarious and prefer to be in their labs than out in the sun. So whatever is blocking it, it's probably not a bunch of scientists.
humans need to adapt to the environmental effects of nature
You've just stated this with no kind of argument to back it up. Why should humans adapt if we're capable of adapting nature? And how is 'flood control' humans adapting to nature. It's a clear example of humans controlling nature.
I can't believe this kind of trite unreasoning nonsense gets modded 'Insightful'.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike my iPod nano which just rebooted because I pressed 'play'.
Do I really have to wait N minutes to submit a correction? /. is so annoying sometimes.
So what is the rule for forming the adjective? We can form (at least) two hypotheses:
- Add the sound -ly to the end of the noun except in various exceptional cases. In particular, crumb is a really weird one-off exception because you add a -bly to the end.
- Add the sound -ly to the end of the noun except for various exceptions. Crubmly is not an exception but we have to adopt the general rule that -mb at the end of a word is pronounced with a silent 'b'.
The second rule is probably better because it doesn't make a special case exception of crumb. And what's nice is that the spelling of crumb, despite having a silent -b, makes some kind of logical sense. If we spelled 'crumb' as 'crum', we'd be reflecting the first rule, and 'crumbly' would be a weird exception.The point is that English spelling often reflects some underlying regularity when you look at the bigger picture. If you wanted to fix English spelling you'd probably need to 'fix' English grammar in order to remove a bunch of spurious spelling rules. That's pretty unlikely to happen, and neither should it.
The BBC of course!
When do Americans sign this contract? What happens to people who decide not to sign this contract? What room do individual Americans have to negotiate the precise terms of this contract? What happens to Americans who renege on this contract?
...range is a weird adaptation to living in an overpopulated city where your next meal is at close range, don't you think?
In the time period mentioned in the story, of course.
...and he can't afford a new MacBook???
Um...Pixar make glorified cartoons. Animators can make fantastic cartoons. But not all movies are cartoons.
Some populations in Polynesia, Australia, New Guinea and South America, say, almost certainly have members who share no ancestry with the rest of the world.
Forget Hubble. The greatest thing America has produced is The Onion.
But you'll do no such thing. I suspect you're simply mean spirited and jealous.
I'm inclined to agree with you.
The absolute worst game ever is Pong. Even the name is stupid - as bad as calling a game Stink or Smell. It's meant to be some kind of tennis game. I daren't actually call it tennis though - the rules are completely wrong and there's no attempt to simulate the net. The rendering is stupendously bad - the ball isn't even round, it's a white square! And the bats or rackets are merely white rectangles. Even the scores are written with blocky text.
The controls are about as primitive as you can get - usually a rotary controller that allows you to move your racket up or down in one dimension. The sound effects have to be heard to be believed - they are merely beeps each time a ball is hit. No attempt at any kind of simulation. The physics is completely trivial. There is almost no opportunity for the exercise of any kind of skill.
Of course Pong will have its apologists. People who will say it's as good as the technology allowed it to be. Sure, it was good for its day (which isn't saying much, there was no competition at the time so no motivation to actually do anything good), but objectively it was the worst game ever made. It sold purely because nobody had seen any video game before, not because it had any inherently good qualities. Some engineer scraped together the bare minimum device that could be called a 'game' given the technology that was available. And believe me, it truly is the bare minimum of a game. The graphics make the rendering in every single game in the bottom 50 list look like the best painting of the Renaissance. Pointing a flashlight at a wall and making the spot of light go up and down probably has as much right to be called a video game and it's about as much fun.
And just in case you're too young to have played this game on a console, you can play it online here. I think you'll see I haven't exaggerated one bit.
This is the UK we're talking about here. By coffee they probably mean instant Nescafé. No, that'd be London. This is as far as you can get from London in the South West. So we're probably talking about instant coffee from some non-name brand, the equivalent of Rola Cola. Whatever, it's probably not worth traveling there for either the coffee or the internet connection. Probably nice scenery though.
I'm all for blue sky research. But I hate to see people taking what they perceive as the moral high ground for going with folding@home, which is speculative research, not a way to cure diseases.
One time my manager showed me some statistics for drug discovery. Drugs need to go through various rounds of testing: it might start with assays with just receptors, move up through animal tests to full blown clinical trials. He showed me two interesting facts: firstly, the correlation between success at one stage and success at the next stage was low. This meant that the correlation between the earliest stages and the final in vivo drug activity was tiny. Secondly, the best drugs were often outliers in the sense that you could often discern some kind of pattern allowing you to predict drug activity for a class of molecule, but that the good drugs fell way outside this pattern. Because activity levels predicted from simulation are so poorly correlated with the first stage of drug trials, and we already know that trials at this stage are poorly correlated with actual drug usefulness, simulations are just as much a waste of resources as SETI.
It seems to me that molecular modeling is actually one of those hard 'macho' (but ultimately pointless) projects that gets funding because to criticize it makes you seem anti-drug, anti-therapy and ant-human-progress.
(I'm not saying people shouldn't try to model molecules. This is a great blue-sky goal. But people who are trying to find drugs or therapies shouldn't be wasting their time with such techniques.)
And now I can explain my sig. I've never known anyone who acted like the creator of the universe was actually watching them. Merely a picture of some eyes has a stronger effect on people than an allmighty omniscient deity who can track every thought, let alone action. It's pretty obvious that nobody actually believes in a deity like this.
I've experienced all kinds of things blocking out the sun - clouds, trees, tall houses, annoying people who decide to set up camp right in front of you on the beach, but never scientists. On the whole, scientists tend not to be all that gregarious and prefer to be in their labs than out in the sun. So whatever is blocking it, it's probably not a bunch of scientists.
I can't believe this kind of trite unreasoning nonsense gets modded 'Insightful'.
...section opening at your favorite pr0n website...
Not to nitpick or anything, but I think the number of apples might be better modeled by a Poisson distribution than a Gaussian.